David is writing about British medical contributions. Here are the highlights, with links to our files. Almost everybody I know has benefited from one or more of these discoveries and inventions.
The sun is setting, the last quiet light fading, the swallows swirling, and I haven't had time to post. I've been collecting images for Sharing the Inheritance and rewriting. Rewriting has become my middle name. One night, with text edits rising and falling in my brain, and unable to sleep, I began rereading the last love in Four Loves by CS Lewis.
The following paragraph struck me. It made me wince and smile -
In reality we all need at times, some of us at most times, that Charity from others which, being Love Himself in them, loves the unlovable. But this, though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. . .
How true, I thought!
We are all receiving Charity, writes Lewis. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it.
Fair enough.
But perhaps those unlovable aspects are not so important? Perhaps, as Julian of Norwich thought, we are more lovable than we think?
Having beaten Juan Carlos Ferrero, Andy Murray heads into the Wimbledon semi-finals. He will play American Andy Roddick, who holds the record for the world's fastest serve.
The Wall Street Journal reports today that this is the year to watch Wimbledon. Not only because the players are outrageously good but because "in some quiet stroke of genius", groundskeepers have seemingly figured out how to grow harder, more resilient grass. "It's producing some absolutely startling tennis."
In 1839 the British Parliament began to wonder what to do about the energetic people living in British colonies north of the United States. Parliament asked for recommendations. An unlikely trio provided them.
They were the Earl of Durham (also known as 'Radical Jack'), brilliant Charles Buller, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who had written about land reform in Australia while languishing in Newgate prison, where he had been sent for eloping with an under-age heiress.
In a blunt report they recommended a union of the colonies with local self-government which would give the people real control over their own destinies. We could use their like today in a Parliament that seems all too willing to cede the destinies of the British people to the European Union, but I digress.
Parliament Hill, Ottawa. Canada's Constitution and Her Majesty's Government in Canada are modelled after the British Constitution. Image: Wikipedia
Empires are not in the habit of willingly granting self-rule to their people. In 1867, in the British North America Act, Britain did.
Vancouver
Canadians have been creating their own destinies ever since. What once was Dominion Day is now Canada Day. Cheers!
Exploring Canada with Alexander Mackenzie is here. The St Lawrence Seaway is here. Newfoundland is here. Making the invisible visible in Vancouver is here.
Canada's banks are strong and Canadians have kept their loonie clear of the debt swamps. The Canadians I've met have been relaxed and kind. There are good things going on.
I looked for a poem about summer, but I guess I looked in all the wrong places because I didn't find one. Instead I found the boy James longing to go to the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf's novel, which is set on the Isle of Skye. To the Lighthouse begins -
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling - all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.
"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, "it won't be fine."
Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.
Mrs Ramsay, the beating heart of the family of eight children and their summer house, comforts her small son. In the evening of their last summer together, she reads poetry. This is not the sonnet she read, but another one by Shakespeare, who knows both summer and loss -
XCVII
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
And yet! The summer is beautiful, and it would be ungrateful not to love summer's beauty no matter what my losses may be.
Andy Murray last night fought back from the biggest scare of his Wimbledon campaign so far to clinch a place in the quarter-finals in the latest match to be played in the tournament. With the rest of Wimbledon cloaked in darkness, Murray battled under the blazing floodlights of the new Centre Court roof, closed for the first time during the championships, to overcome the extraordinary challenge of Stanilas Wawrinka, the No 19 seed.
Murray was tenacious, and the support from the crowd was terrific.
Hundreds of laid-off U.K. workers got their jobs back this week after organizing mass protests at energy plants across the country, coordinated through text messages and social-networking Web sites.
The contractor companies at Total SA's 200,000-barrels-a-day Lindsey oil refinery met nearly all the striking workers' demands, which had become a rallying cry of sympathy strikes across the U.K.'s engineering-construction industry.
Back in February, we wrote about the wildcat strikes - Hurray!. They occurred because under EU regulations British workers can lose their jobs to anyone anywhere in the EU who is willing to work for less. Janet Daley explained -
The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities. . .An individual travelling to seek work, prepared to take his chances in fair competition with local workers is one thing: the organised recruitment of people from the poorest regions of the poorest countries in Europe in order to reduce employers' wage costs in the more prosperous ones, is something else altogether.
That is what had been happening. We're glad to see that in this case it was stopped.
Alan Betts suggested that Max Shean, one of the real X-men, deserved a write-up here. He certainly does.
Lieutenant-Commander Max Shean, who has died aged 90, was one of the small band of young men who, in the face of extraordinary peril, carried the sea war into enemy harbours in World War II; in the process they won a total of 68 awards for bravery, including four VCs; for his own exploits, Shean received a DSO and Bar.
Born in 1918, news of the Dunkirk evacuation had inspired Max to join the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserves. A man of slender build, Shean was no swashbuckler. He was a man of quiet purpose, optimism and integrity. He was a meticulous planner. Shean first trained in anti-submarine warfare in Sydney before serving on a British corvette, HMS Bluebell, on Atlantic convoy escort duty.
Criss-crossing the U-boat infested North Atlantic, Shean took part in the desperate defence of convoy OG77, which had been attacked by a wolf pack. He was nicknamed 'King Ping' for his skill in using sonar.
He then volunteered for training in the top-secret X-craft submarines.
Nearly 66 years ago, a flotilla of mini-submarines set off to sink or cripple the mighty German battleship Tirpitz. Among the men behind this attack was Max Shean from Perth, a volunteer for one of World War II's most daring and hazardous naval missions.
The Tirpitz mission went tragically wrong, but Shean saved the tow ship, diving down into the freezing waters to free the ship's port propellor from the tow rope. In 1944, he successfully threaded his way through Norwegian fjords to lay explosive charges. Transferred to the Pacific, he was the commander of the midget submarine that cut vital Japanese underwater cables in Operation Sabre.
He returned to Australia with the woman he had fallen in love with in Scotland, and they raised two daughters. He worked in the power industry and sailed his yacht Bluebell (once to Britain)
Max Shean was a quiet man who did essential things. Ave atque Vale.
Thanks for the link, Alan.
UPDATE: FSC Dive Captain Peter McMahon has just written to say that he is selling Max Shean's book Corvette and Submarine on behalf of the family. The books are about to be listed on Ebay. All were signed by Max who was a long term member of the Fremantle Sailing Club. For more information, contact Captain McMahon at redwinepeter@yahoo.com.
The first game of ice hockey was played by British soldiers in Canada in the 1850s. It's believed the game was based on the English game of field hockey, the Irish game of hurling, the Scottish game of shinty and the Native American game of lacrosse.
A nice tradition: the winning team usually takes the Stanley Cup on the road, to raise money for charity.
Music was George Bernard Shaw’s first love, and he claimed that his plays were operas in disguise. Yet few composers have found inspiration in the chilly glitter of his dialogue, and only one musical version of a Shaw play, “My Fair Lady,” has hit the bull’s-eye - until now.
Terry seems a little insouciant to me. My Fair Lady is quite a bull's eye, and glitter only partly describes Shaw's writing. Autobiographical would be another description, as Terry points out. Shaw was a fascinating man. Brilliant, with enough unsubstantiated opinions to fill several large suitcases.
British scientists advance fight against superbugs
The Telegraph reports - Byotrol, which was first developed by a Manchester-based paint firm to fight bacteria in bread factories, has cut levels of MRSA on hospital wards by one third in the biggest trial of its kind. The results came from the 11-month independent study at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI), following similar tests at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
The antimicrobial technology may be able to eradicate superbugs from hospitals. It has a polymer based structure which enables it to kill bacteria days after being first applied, unlike conventional bleaches which stop working shortly after they dry.
What better subject?
With many more students applying to university this year, there is concern there are not enough places, but there is also this interesting news - at Birmingham, which has seen a nine per cent rise overall, there has been a 65 per cent rise in the number of students studying economics.
With any luck they are studying Adam Smith and Hayek.
On June 26th 1857, on horseback in Hyde Park, Queen Victoria personally gave the Victoria Cross to each of 62 servicemen, bending down to pin it on their uniforms.
On a beautiful summer day - or on a rainy summer's day - few of us like to think of dying for any reason. Risking your life to save your friends is one of the most poignant reasons for valour. It is a reason that has inspired recipients of the Victoria Cross.
The Victoria Cross is the highest recognition for valour in the face of the enemy that can be given to members of the British and Commonwealth armed forces of any rank in any service, and civilians under military command.
The most recent award of the Victoria Cross to a British service person was the posthumous award on 14 December 2006 to Corporal Bryan Budd of 3 Para. He died to save his fellow paras.
The first act of valour ever to be recognized by the award of the Victoria Cross was that of Charles Davis Lucas, 20 years old, of the Royal Navy -
In May 1854 Lucas was appointed mate of HMS Hecla, a small paddle-wheel steam warship, under the command of Captain William Hutcheon Hall. On the night of 21–2 June 1854 the Hecla, with two other ships, was engaging the Russian fortress at Bomarsund, on the Baltic Åland Islands. At the height of the action a Russian shell landed on deck, the fuse still hissing and burning. All hands were ordered to fling themselves flat, but Lucas with great coolness and presence of mind ran forward and hurled the shell into the sea, where it exploded with a tremendous roar. All the sailors lived.
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting.
. . .The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. - 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. . .Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled.
. . .. . . New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program. . .
On June 25th 1967, the first live, international, satellite television production Our World was broadcast to 26 countries and 400 million viewers. The idea came from Aubrey Singer of the BBC. The ground rules included: no politicians or heads of state will participate. Artists from nineteen nations performed in separate segments featuring their respective countries. (The USSR pulled out at the last minute and dragged its Eastern block prisoner nations with it.)
The United Kingdom's segment remains the most famous today. John Lennon wrote All You Need Is Love, and the song was transmitted live at 8:54 p.m. from the BBC control room. The Beatles invited their friends to join the chorus and create a festive atmosphere. It's a wonderful sight - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull singing and the stolid-looking horn players and string section of the BBC orchestra playing. With performers like these, the song needed only a single rehearsal.
Along with love, ten thousand technicians, producers, and translators were required to make the massive broadcast a success.
"It's easy", John sings, and I know sometimes it's not, but in the happiness that bubbles up with the music it's easier than I think.
Update: Today Daniel Henninger suggests what a wired world could mean to dissidents in Iran 2.0. And Wolf Howling provides another excellent update.
Thanks to Howard Maunders of Beautiful Britain for reminding us of this date.
"The BBC Persian Service is very popular and respected in Iran, and the BBC is working actively to increase its satellite coverage and foil Iranian attempts to block their signal, this has made the Iranian government very suspicious," said Michael Williams, a professor of international relations at the University of London.
Williams also noted the British have opened their embassy in Tehran to treat people injured in the demonstrations.
Memorials to Robert the Bruce and William Wallace at Stirling. The Battle of Bannockburn was fought near Stirling Castle against a much larger English force.
Bruce and the Scots had fought for years in an unceasing campaign against the English king Edward I. They often lost. They refused to quit. They outlasted Edward I.
On June 24th 1314, Robert the Bruce and the forces of Scotland defeated the forces of Edward II at Bannockburn, a decisive battle in the Scottish struggle for independence. Six years later, on April 6th 1320, in the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scots said exactly why they had fought -
It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
Freedom.
Those who wonder why freedom is important can probably never be told.
They are the people who like the idea of big empires, big decision makers (and big bureaucracies) making big decisions for us. They imagine they can make decisions for all the families in the world. The idea that the Scots could and should decide what is best for them in Scotland is beyond their ken.
It may be that a great global decision has to be made about protecting the world's environment - but that is no reason that Scotland or Britain should be swallowed up by the European Union and be forced to make a million other decisions in unison as well.
Though Scots may not agree, it seems to us that the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland in 1707 had many positive aspects. It is also a fact that the Scots have maintained their sense of individuality and that some of them today continue to press for independence. Many English people share those feelings because increasingly the power of deciding for themselves has been taken away from them.
Freedom - the right to govern ourselves - and to meet as independent, free and peaceful countries with other peaceful, free and independent countries - to work as a team, but to remain our individual selves - that is what so many people want today.
Photo: Courtesy Peter Greenaway and the New York Times
You can enjoy the influence of painting in film director Peter Greenaway's work (The Draughtsman's Contract, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Prospero's Books).
Now, says the Times,
Greenaway has married High Renaissance painting and advanced technology. . . in a 50-minute digital extravaganza of light, sound, theatrical illusion and formal dissection that is being projected onto and around a full-scale replica of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana.
. . .It covers the great rear wall of the Benedictine refectory on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, exactly where the original hung from 1562, when Veronese finished it, until 1797. That’s when Napoleon had it taken down, cut up and carted back to Paris as war booty.
. . .In Venice for the biennale, and hearing that the Greenaway was worth seeing, I went not knowing what to expect, sat down with other visitors on the refectory’s cool marble floor, leaned back, looked up and, as the piece began, felt my jaw drop. . .
Lovely work if you can get it. Judith Thrush Carter says -
I’ve taken botanical illustration, Elizabethan music, the Vikings in Britain, introduction to archaeology, and the gardens of Oxford.
My first class was taught by a composer, and there were only six of us. We heard the lectures in the morning, and we went to see a wonderful collection of musical instruments right next door. Then the next day we went to the library and saw the manuscripts that these Elizabethan composers actually wrote. In the evening we would go to the church in Exeter College and they would have a concert of the same music that we had studied in class. There’s a cathedral that has a sung service right before dinner. And so we also went to that and heard them sing the music we had studied. . .
Raymond Boyce studied Viking literature and artifacts at Downing College, Cambridge. In the evening he studied the pubs. . .
Father's Day has just passed, and fathers remain an endangered species, unappreciated by many women, unknown by many children and deliberately discriminated against by the courts. Meanwhile statistics show that families without fathers are far poorer, and children far more vulnerable to drugs and crime.
So I looked for a tribute to fathers. I cannot say that British poetry is overflowing with them.
What I found was written by the sometimes sentimental Edgar Albert Guest, who was born in Birmingham in 1881, moved to Detroit when he was ten, and became a reporter and poet . He wrote Only A Dad in 1916 -
Only A Dad
Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame
To show how well he has played the game;
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.
Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more
Plodding along in the daily strife,
Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,
With never a whimper of pain or hate,
For the sake of those who at home await.
Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,
Merely one of the surging crowd,
Toiling, striving from day to day,
Facing whatever may come his way,
Silent whenever the harsh condemn,
And bearing it all for the love of them.
Only a dad but he gives his all,
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing with courage stern and grim
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen:
Only a dad, but the best of men.
I used to sleep with my head only a few inches from a swift's nest, divided from it by a thin plaster wall. All sorts of strange rustlings could be heard: not just the flutter and flap of parents arriving, and the mousy cheeping sounds of the young being fed during the day, but strange, protracted movements at all hours of the night. It turns out that the young do a sort of press-up, over and over, as if straining for flight, strengthening their wings for a life in the air.
The moment a swiftlet leaves the nest is a departure without parallel in the natural world. Hauling itself on its tiny feet to the lip, the wings rowing it forward, the young bird pushes itself out into space and falls. Tumbling down, it gains speed, opens it wings, and flies – for the next four years. The wings are too long and the legs too short for a grounded bird to regain the air. There will be no perching, no landfall, nothing but the sky and permanent motion for thousands and thousands of miles. Only when the bird has reached full maturity, and found a mate, will it come down and breed. . .
And what a journey that will be.
One of many things to love - British nature writing.
Horatio Clare has just published A Single Swallow: Following An Epic Migration from South Africa to South Wales (Chatto and Windus), available through the Telegraph.
Sir Richard Dalton was British Ambassador to Iran from 2002–2006. Sir Richard writes about hopes for democracy in Iran, and says that the Iranian Government may suppress this truth and this people this time, but "There will be a next time".
Good, but never mind next time. I am praying this is the time. I think we all are.
The Lord Judge said: “In this country trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice. It is properly identified as a right, available to be exercised by a defendant unless and until the right is amended or circumscribed by express legislation.”
He is wrong. The right to trial by jury is always our right and cannot be amended by statute legislation no matter what lawyers, judges or politicians say.
Jury nobbling
The Lord Judge is exasperated because accusations of "jury nobbling" have caused the case against four defendants to collapse, and the whole business has proved to be what anything legal is - an extremely expensive business. That, and the apparent inability of the police to stop jury nobbling in this case, is why the lord judge is eager to dispense with trial by jury for the four defendants and put his shoe in his mouth.
So, because the law in Britain has grown ridiculously expensive and the police have grown ineffective, we are to dispense with our rights?
The baby goes out with the bathwater
Sure, wrote Barry in the comments to the Times report. The right to a jury trial is just "a vestige from Feudal times".
Families whose children have been taken away from them by a judge in family court without any benefit of jury will no doubt agree.
So will those who established the jury trial as a shield against state power, and gave jurors the duty to be judges of law as well as fact and to refuse to convict a person if they believed the law under which he was charged was unconstitutional or unjust.
Our "modest" proposal
We sympathize with the judge who hopes this case will be resolved before those alleged to have stolen £1.75 million at Heathrow - John Twomey, 61, Peter Blake, 56, Barry Hibberd, 41, and Glen Cameron, 49 - line up for their pensions.
But that is no reason to undermine our fundamental right to trial by jury.
Still, perhaps there is something to be said for this idea - if jury nobbling can be absolutely proved, the court might well move that the defendants had admitted their guilt and send them to their comfortable, internet-connected cells forthwith.
Lord's is the official keeper of cricket's relics and its history, "the game's spiritual core".
But, says Thomas Dyja, in his interesting though somewhat suspect Wall Street Journal account, "it's no longer where the money is, or the power - India has those now. A global mutiny has swept the cricketing world, pitting the realities of the marketplace against the purity of the game, and it all centers on a faster, louder, harder-hitting version called Twenty20, whose World Cup is being played here at. . .Lord's".
So Lord's is hosting the cricket that is supposedly pitted against it?
Is it bad that cricket has become popular in a variety of forms? Barrister Edward Bishop, a fan of both, puts it well -
"T20 doesn't acquire its own history, as test cricket does. It's a snapshot, not a book."
Though America was at odds with the British in those days, Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was not simply a victory for Britain . . .and not just a victory for Europeans, free of French domination to pursue their own patchwork fits and starts toward modern nationhood and democracy.
Waterloo’s final result cleared the way for English to become the world’s new lingua franca, for English Common Law, English education, English capitalism, and. . .English notions of freedom and equality to become worldwide templates and ideals. It shaped our world.
A brief accounting in the Liberty Timeline shows how beastly Napoleon was. Stopping him was a good thing, though, as Crittenden points out, bloody.
They brought honesty and common sense, fair play and compassion, bravery and self-discipline, rational thought and faith and a passionate love of liberty to a 2000-year-long struggle to achieve freedom.
They were a fellowship of men and women, slave and free who changed the world.
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BRITS AT THEIR BEST - inventions, sports, literary masterpieces, heroes, blogs and sites of notes Copyright 2009 by David Abbott and Catherine Glass
"Brits at their Best. A magnificent
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The best of the Brits produced thousands of indispensable inventions, developed wildly popular sports, designed romantic houses and gardens, created astonishing literary masterpieces, lived with style and humour, tackled dangerous missions with daring and ingenuity, and fought with indomitable courage to establish and protect the free world. We aim to describe their superb achievements and extraordinary lives. We celebrate creativity and common sense, fair play and compassion, bravery and self-discipline, rational thought, freedom, faith, and wit.
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CATHERINE (CAT) GLASS
I'm an American and the descendant of Czech, Irish, and English defenders of freedom. I enjoy sharing the inheritance - liberty, love of God, reason, imagination, fair play, a generous and forgiving spirit, the rule of just law, representative government, books, gardens, music, art, sports, inventions. . .
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