From the midst of all this confusion, organized and disorganized movements, the collapse of trade, the desertion of workers, the sudden emergence of a thousand voices claiming, clamoring, debating, the physical wreck of business, the inflamed transcendentalism that saw ahead of the present moment, re-adjudication, rehabilitation, renovation of all social wrongs; and with the cruel winter breathing its desolating rigors, the snow rising in the streets, the poor dying from starvation or exposure, the steamers crowded to their taffrails, daily exporting the timid and selfish rich, or the pinched poor, escaping with a bare competency, to establish themselves under less penurious skies--from all this there suddenly grew into stalwart and national proportions, _the resolve to leave England_. It grew with a certain flaming ardor of noble hopes and resolves. It grew also with an agony of doubt. The whole implication of the idea was grievously wounding to pride, and it strained at the very heart-string of the English nature. To go away from England was to become _un-Englished_, to lose the rich heritage of pastoral beauty, the treasured wealth of historic associations, the spot and home of literary triumphs, the soil, the air, which by some impalpable union of efficacies made the English blood and temperament, and which could not be taken away to make the same fine product elsewhere. The pathos of it! A nation wandering homeless with its Lares and Penates in its arms, its face darkened with humiliation; its shoulders, that erstwhile bore the burdens of states, bowed with the shame of enforced desertion; its voice, that summoned the freemen of the earth to convocation, silent with fear, or perhaps broken by the irrepressible echo wrung from its own anguish, at turning its back on the cradle and the home of its greatness. _And yet it grew_--this same resolve--and eloquence, and poetry, and prayers, and science, and statescraft united to make it strong and beautiful, to blend in it the supernatural benisons of religion, the purified affections of the heart, and the resolute affirmations of conviction. “My friends,”--it was Leacraft speaking from the fireside of the Bothwell Club, in Cheapside, on the night of February 12th, 1910--“I think the speech to-day of the members from Scotland in Parliament was decisive. It leaves no alternative. We cannot hopelessly, in the face of this modern world’s competition, fight out a narrowing chance for existence under the conditions facing us. And it is an unmistakable alternative. Our climate has changed, and the change is irrevocable, and it is subversive, too. We must go away, taking all that we have with us. The English nation has reached a sublime crisis. We transplant our virtues; we will relinquish our failings; we have a world of our own to choose from, and we are given an opportunity unparalleled in history.” “It’s a great chance to begin all over again,” expostulated Jim.