100 years ago in COUNTRY LIFE

December 9, 1916

WE are making sacrifices to preserve this pleasant land of England today for which there is no parallel in history, unless perhaps in that dim time when, unsurrendering, the Britons of these islands went down before the repeated invasions of that new race we call our own—the English. We look back and see the gradual fusion of all the different conquerors until there has emerged from the storied past the love that makes men die for ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’.