And the Red Ensign, commercial, industrial, historic, pervaded
the sea! Assertive only by its numbers, highly significant, and, under
its character of a trade--emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic
of old and new ideas, of conservatism and progress, of routine and
enterprise, of drudgery and adventure--and of a certain easy-going
optimism that would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had
not been so stubbornly, so everlastingly active.
The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served this
flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly a mysterious sense of its
greatness. It sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under the
sleepless eye of the sun. It held up the Edifice. But it crowned it
too. This is not the extravagance of a mixed metaphor. It is the sober
expression of a not very complex truth. Within that double function the
national life that flag represented so well went on in safety, assured of
its daily crust of bread for which we all pray and without which we would
have to give up faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of
our minds and the sanctified strength of our labouring arms.
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