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In the months ahead, Britannia could conceivably even retreat into isolation. Her history, talents and interests suggest, on the contrary, that she will find new worlds to win. "In the past," Arnold Toynbee wrote in Encounter, "the English have avoided the awful mistake of crying over spilt milk. They have quickly found and milked new cows. They stopped grieving over their defeat in the Hundred Years' War in the exhilaration of discovering and colonizing a New World. They stopped grieving over the loss of the 13 American colonies in the exhilaration of making the Industrial Revolution and acquiring a new Empire in India."
Since World War II, Toynbee observed, "this simple but effective British philosophy" helped turn the 19th century Empire into the 20th century Commonwealth, and powered a social revolution at home. "Achievements," he concluded, "are wasting assets, and nothing but unremitting hard work can ever renew them. In a world in which Americans, Russians, Chinese and Japanese, as well as Continental Europeans, are all working like beavers, can any nation afford to sit back and rest on its oars?"
* Crowther's pet solution for expanding higher education is to start at least two new universities, which would use Oxford and Cambridge buildings during the 240 days of vacation each year when they are not in use.