Page 50 - Hampdens Monument Unveiled

OXFORD CHRONICLE
SATURDAY, JUNE 24,1843
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HAMPDEN - THE PAST AND PRESENT.

It has been a labour of love to us this week to present to our
readers an account of the commemoration of JOHN HAMPDEN, on
Chalgrove Field, and to prepare a memoir, brief and imperfect
though it may be, of that illustrious patriot. Englishmen have
much of which they may be justly proud; a country distinguished
by the arts and of peace; a centre of civilisation; the home of
millions of intelligent, free born, active men; of men who have
made sea and land tributary to their skill and industry, and
created an amount of wealth without example in the history of
nations.

But not in these things does the worthy Englishman find the
chief causes of his exultation in the English name; no, nor in
the extent of territory, and myriads of human beings subject to
the British Crown, far less in the equivocal glories of
desolating war, in which triumph, the glare of success, and the
appeals to national pride, cannot hide from the TRUE MAN the
falsehood, the hollowness, the foul injustice, the misery,
which the ambition of the violent and most worthless of men
have occasioned, by hounding on nation against nation, for the
gratification of he vanity, or the devilish lust of power of
the wretched insects, who, by force, or fraud, or accident, to
have attained high places of the earth.

It is not for these things that the true Englishman glories
in and loves his country, and his countrymen; but because that,
in spite of the territorial conquest of his country by robber
bands -despite of brutal and brutalising power -in spite of
strong handed injustice, acting by means of spurious and
unlawful legality -in spite of feudalism, and priest craft, and
statecraft -Englishmen have kept alive the free spirit of their
SAXON forefathers, and through centuries of struggle against
governments, worked out their own redemption.

This is the true ground of the glory of England and of
Englishmen. We may rejoice in the elements of wealth in which
our country abounds : in the treasures beneath our soil, and in
the skill which gives value to those treasures; we may rejoice
in the productive powers of our soil, and in the enterprise of
our artisans and manufacturers and merchants, that our ships
visit every sea and that the products of British industry are
to be found alike amidst barbarous tribes, in far off deserts,
and where ever civilisation has created a taste for ART. But
the Englishman is humbled amidst his pride on these accounts.
He thinks of millions of his countrymen scarcely subsisting
upon the coarsest kind of food, and is made to feel, how much