The Star in the West

118 THE STAR IN THE WEST embedded in a slight verse of four lines the nucleus of all true patriotism , greater than power , wealth , or dominion , and that is motherhood : Fiercer desires may cast away All things most good ; A people may forget to - day Their motherhood . 1 This is the condition of the England of to - day : “ O England ! England , mighty England falls !” because she no longer knows how to bear Englishmen . Wealth cries for luxury , and luxury sniffs at the hem of lust , and lust rises o’er us a vampire kite to drink dry the blood of our veins . The two great ideals of our country , as Geoffrey Mortimer rightly says , are the commercial , and the voluptuous .? Every man striving against his brother , struggling and elbowing his way through the seething crowds of human life to satisfy his own personal lusts . Gentility has become the lowest plane of mental degradation , and so as the monde sinks in this social earthquake does the demi - monde rise . Phryne trips lightly to - day down Piccadilly , bringing with her no little of the beauties of Praxiteles , and the craft of Apelles . We see her no longer the draggle - tailed prostitute of the more eminently Christian centuries , but as a Venus Anadyomene rising from the sea of human corruption . It was Phryne who uttered those memorable wordsover the ruins of Thebes : “ Alexander diruit , sed meretrix Phryne refecit ”; and it is now Alice and Rosie , who are uttering them over the ruins of the temple of Vesta . Thais cajoled Alexander into ? Mysteries : Lyrical and Dramatic , vol . i, p . 121 . 2 Blight of Respectability , p . 110 .