If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimately
because that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all the
tapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture,
like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean.
And if this is true of our use of the word "bull," it is obviously
even truer of our use of the word "lion." The later emblem is enough
to show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean,
but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean.
In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea;
the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle of
the land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the lands
that mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the one
that in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine.
In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richard
the Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiers
in Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he.
His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted in
knowing where he was and why he was there.
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