THE SAXON AND THE CELT 
 
THE 
 
 SAXON AND THE CELT 
 
 A STUDY IN SOCIOLOGY 
 
 JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS," ".MODERN HUMANISTS," ETC., ETC. 
 
 X n n 
 
 UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED 
 
 i6 JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C. 
 
 1897 
 

C O N T E N T S. 
 
 Preamble . . . • . 
 
 I. The Question of Race — 
 
 § I. The Present Troulde .... 
 
 g 2. English and Irish ..... 
 
 § 3. French and Germans .... 
 
 § 4. The Problem of Race Origins 
 
 § 5. The Naming of Celts, Gauls, Germans, and Teutons 
 
 v/ § 6. "Celtic" and "Teutonic" Ilistury 
 
 § 7. The Ethic of the Race Instinct 
 
 II. Tjie Lesson of Irish History — 
 § I. The Causation of the Past . 
 § 2. The Modern Problem 
 § 3. The Verdict of Europe 
 
 III. Mommsen and Richey on Gauls and Irish 
 
 IV. Hill Burton on the Scottish Celts . 
 V. J. R. Green on Celts and Teutons 
 
 VI. The Duke ok Argyll on Irish History 
 VII. Mr Goldwin Smith's Polemic 
 VIII. Mr Froude on Ireland 
 IX. Mr Balfour on Irish Civilisation 
 
 Epilogue. A Program for Ireland— 
 
 § I. A Federal Constitution . 
 
 § 2. Provision for Ulster 
 
 § 3. Nationalisation of Rent 
 
 § 4. Promotion of Agriculture and Industry 
 
 § 5. Education and Religion . 
 
 Index ...... 
 
 I 
 
 5 
 
 15 
 29 
 
 43 
 
 72 
 
 114 
 
 125 
 
 157 
 177 
 
 190 
 205 
 221 
 
 234 
 
 265 
 294 
 305 
 
 321 
 324 
 329 
 332 
 338 
 
 343 
 
 9834'J7 
 
PREAMBLE. 
 
 Some repetitions occur in the following chapters, in respect that 
 certain points touched on in their order in the two main treatises 
 are also dealt with in one or other of the critiques which follow. 
 It seemed advisable to let such iterations occur, at the risk of 
 some objection, by way of preserving whatever degree of com- 
 pleteness was attained in the different sections. The reason for 
 including the separate critiques in the volume is that, written as 
 they were to rebut particular writings, they may still serve their 
 purpose for readers who can take more interest in a special polemic 
 than in a general discussion or exposition. 
 
 It may perhaps be well to anticipate one other probable objec- 
 tion, of a more important kind. This book is avowedly put 
 together partly by way of discrediting the habit, common among 
 the opponents of the Irish nationalist movement, of setting down 
 Irish difficulties to peculiarities of character in the Irish race : 
 and it is likely that I shall be told, for one thing, that the practice 
 in question is kept in countenance by those who allege Irish 
 pecuharities as a reason for an Irish legislature ; and for another, 
 that some eminent members of the Unionist party or school have 
 repudiated the tenet. 
 
 Both of these rejoinders would be true. It is true that some 
 Irish Nationalists, and some of their English sympathisers, persist 
 in ascribing to the Irish people peculiarities of character which, 
 apart from other considerations, necessitate Home Rule. Some 
 on that side candidly specify even faults. Even such a pro-Irish 
 writer as M. Paul Fournier is found avowing,^ in respect of the 
 laxity of old Irish land tenures, that " everything in Ireland is 
 uncertain and mobile, like the (Celtic genius, as inconstant as it is 
 lively and penetrating." On this head I can but say that, seeking 
 
 ' La Question Agraire en Irlande, 1882, p. 9. 
 
VI PREAMBLE. 
 
 as I do to upset such generalisations, and to discredit all claims 
 of innate and unchanging racial peculiarity, I take up an inde- 
 pendent and non-partisan position, and am not answerable for 
 what I reckon to be fallacies in the talk of politicians with whose 
 program I am in agreement. So, too, when so able a writer 
 as Mr Prendergast speaks of the ancient Irish as " a people of 
 original sentiments and institutions, the native vigour of whose 
 mind had not been weakened by another mind," ^ thus representing 
 as a merit or advantage what is really a condition of animal stag- 
 nation in any society, I can but point out that such views have 
 no necessary connection with any modern political program, 
 being but a result of the general failure hitherto to realise the 
 nature of civilisation, in every sense of the term. 
 
 Some such criticism must be made even in the case of writers 
 who have done much to elucidate the laws of civilisation. Among 
 these I gladly rank the late Professor Richey, whose Lectures on 
 Irish History, afterwards incorporated in his posthumous Short 
 History of the Irish People, constitute one of the best treatises, 
 and contain some of the most valuable ideas, known to me in 
 this connection. He offered in particular some excellent explana- 
 tions, in terms of proximate causation, of tendencies in Irish history 
 which are often idly set down to " innate " qualities of " race." 
 Yet even this admirable writer, dealing with the crude talk of 
 Mommsen on ancient Gallic and modern Irish characteristics, 
 proceeds to develop, as against that, a thesis equally unscientific 
 and uncritical, in which the " Celtic race " in the lump is credited 
 with certain gifts and certain defects, irrespective of culture-stage 
 or other causal circumstance. I can only ask the reader to weigh 
 on their merits the answers hereinafter given to both theses, ob- 
 serving here that I regard them as alike survivals of the formerly 
 general habit of ascribing all national action to race-character. 
 
 On the other hand, I find myself in agreement, on the racial 
 question, with some writers whose political program I oppose. 
 Several avowed " Unionists " have either explicitly or implicitly 
 condemned the practice of setting down Irish difiiculties to faults 
 or peculiarities of Irish character. Thus, for instance, the anony- 
 
 ^ The Cromwellian Settlement, p. ii. 
 
PREAMIJLK. Vll 
 
 mous author of the Speaker's Handbook o)i the Irisli Question^ 
 without taking the least note of the fact that thousands of his 
 own aUies attribute " Celtic " vices to the Irish people in general 
 outside of Ulster, observes that " Thoughtless and inaccurate 
 people speak sometimes of their [the Irish people's] Celtic origin ; 
 but when they do it only displays absolute ignorance." If it be 
 so, the alleged ignorance is probably the prevailing state of mind 
 among the party to which he belongs. As will be seen hereafter, 
 I do not agree with this writer and his authorities (among whom 
 he is able to include Mr Gladstone) in the assertion that "the 
 larger number of the so-called Irish people are Anglo-Saxon "i^ 
 but it is of course obvious that such a statement negates all 
 imputation of " Celtic " sins to the Irish people. 
 
 And one of the most distinguished adherents of the party 
 has given the last-quoted writer his cue. In the chapters 
 of his History of Eng/and iti the Eighteenth Century which 
 he has rearranged as a History of Ireland in the Eighteenth 
 Century, Mr Lecky has repelled the " Celtic " line of attack 
 on Irish character as he has repelled others. " Ethnologi- 
 cally," he observes, " the distribution and even the distinc- 
 tion of Celts and Teutons are questions which are far from 
 settled : and the qualities that are supposed to belong to each 
 have very seldom the consistency that might be expected. 
 Nations change profoundly in the very respects in which their 
 characters might be thought most indelible ; and the theory of 
 race is met at every turn by perplexing exceptions."- And he 
 is able to quote from the late Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in 
 express connection with Irish history, the suggestion " that 
 many, perhaps most, of the differences in kind alleged to exist 
 between Aryan sub-races, are really differences merely in degree 
 of development. It is to be hoped that contemporary thought 
 will before long make an effort to emancipate itself from the 
 habits of levity, in adopting theories of race, which it seems to 
 have contracted. Many of these theories appear to have little 
 merit except the facilities they give for building on them infer- 
 
 ^ Speaker'' s Handboolc, ]>. 9. 
 
 " History of Ireland in the Eigliteeutti Century, new cd., i. 397. , 
 
Vlll PREAMBLE. 
 
 ences tremendously out of proportion to the mental labour which 
 they cost the builder." ^ But it is to be observed that this 
 somewhat cumbrous sarcasm strikes as directly against much of 
 Maine's own previous teaching as against anybody else's ; and 
 I make the observation not by way of mere disparagement, but 
 by way of bringing out the fact that preconceptions as to race 
 qualities are almost inseparable from the line of political thought 
 with which Mr Lecky is now, like Sir Henry Maine, identified. 
 It is in liis Ancient Law^ his most widely circulated book, that 
 Elaine explains the relative stagnation of China by the suggestion 
 that the Chinese laws " are co-extensive wath all the ideas of 
 which the race is capable " ; and though he cancels this view not 
 only implicitly, as in the above cited passage of his later work on 
 the Early History of Institutions, but explicitly, in the remark in 
 the same work^ that "doubtless our assumption of the absolute 
 immobility of the Chinese and other societies is in part the 
 expression of our ignorance," he never withdrew or qualified his 
 previous teaching as to " the stationary and progressive races." 
 On the contrary, he reaffirmed it in his latest volume, Popular 
 Governjnent,'^ though he there cited also ^'' his previous remark 
 just quoted as to China. As I have elsewhere urged, this re- 
 iteration of contradictions revealed a failure on Maine's part 
 to reach any coherent philosophy of history. To stand con- 
 sistently by his criticisms of theories of race would have been 
 to pull to pieces his partisan teachings, and this he would not do. 
 Now, Maine's case is typical of that of the party of which he 
 was one of the ornaments. In the practice of political con- 
 servatism, enlightened views must always subordinate themselves 
 to prejudices : and when for any reason an enlightened man 
 enters on reactionary courses, he will not only find himself in 
 alliance with those who afifirm the contrary of his most important 
 teachings : he will further tend to say what they say. Thus we 
 find the Duke of Argyll, who might have been supposed to 
 be committed to the rejection of the Celtophobic view of the 
 Irish (juestion, whether or not he considers himself a Celt, 
 
 ' Early History of Iiislitiitioin, pp. 96-97. 
 
 2 P. 23, =' P. 227. ^ P. 22. ^ P. 192. 
 
PREAMBLE. IX 
 
 and who in his work on Irish Nationalism makes at times a 
 profession of disclaiming any assumption as to race tendencies, 
 nevertheless lapsing repeatedly into expressions which set down 
 Irish troubles to " ineradicable " vices of primeval Irish character. 
 Mr Lecky is now in political alliance with the Duke of Argyll : 
 and Mr Lecky, being not a more but perhaps even a less con- 
 sistent teacher than the Duke, is inevitably following the Duke's 
 intellectual path in this matter. I -ike Maine, he has failed to 
 reach any coherent sociology ; and as we find him, on the hust- 
 ings, making the declaration " I am a Christian," after writing 
 a great deal which implied that he was not, so we find him 
 unconsciously lapsing into the ordinary Conservative view of 
 the Irish problem, after doing a great deal to put that view 
 out of court. 
 
 For there is a certain psychological compulsion, so to speak, 
 on nearly all opponents of Irish nationalist claims, to revert in 
 some way to the attitude of race prejudice. Mr Lecky, having 
 begun literary life as a sympathiser with the cause of the country 
 in which he was born, was saved like Burke from the ordinary 
 English prejudice against it ; and it would certainly be diflicult 
 for him to get into the attitude, say, of the late Mr Fronde, or of 
 Mr Goldwin Smith. But under pressure of party ties Burke came 
 to hold a tolerably Anglican tone towards the Irish Catholics ; and 
 Mr Lecky's work on Democracy serves to show how his temperament 
 is settling for him the practical problems of sociology. He is 
 coming to the political philosophy of the Duke of xVrgyll and 
 the author of the Speaker's Handbook — a philosophy which 
 consists in making out all Irish nationalist claims, protests, and 
 discontents to be utterly unreasonable, and to be the manu- 
 facture of unscrupulous men. From this it is but a step to the 
 surmise that these unscrupulous men are so because they come 
 of a bad stock, and that the people who listen to them must be 
 of a bad stock too. 
 
 All political strifes, broadly speaking, may be resolved into 
 oppositions of interest, when they are not strifes of simple re- 
 ligious fanaticism, or of mere habitual faction. Now, the Unionist 
 party cannot well concede, even as regards their main body, that 
 
X PREAMBLE. 
 
 they are proceeding upon the mere habit of opposing Liberal 
 measures or upon the mere inspiration of rchgious bigotry. 
 Eitlier they must admit that there are real interests involved — 
 that the Irish majority stands on its interest, and that the English 
 majority, in so far as it reasons, stands with the contrary interest 
 — or they must fall back on the imputation of some general vice 
 of character to the Irish people. They might argue, of course, 
 that national interests are often misunderstood, and that the 
 Irish people in the mass misunderstands its interest. But that 
 relatively humane way of arguing comes too near the attitude of 
 reasoning reform to be compatible with the policy of a party 
 which in the case in hand has no reform to offer. So, whatever 
 may be the humanity of numbers of the silent adherents of what 
 we may call the anti-Irish cause, and whatever may be the former 
 scientific teaching of some of its nominal authorities, the osten- 
 sible reasoning of the mass tends always to assume what Mr 
 Gladstone calls the savage form. Hence it has seemed well to 
 track down that species of argument to its roots of ignorance and 
 animal instinct. 
 
 I say its roots, meaning simply that the conviction originates 
 in or can be traced back to these elements, not at all that it is 
 cherished only by the ignorant and the unreflecting. It must be 
 expressly admitted, as I have already done, that the habit of 
 imputing specific and permanent characters to nations in the 
 lump is to be seen among men of great acuteness and abundant 
 information. The most intellectual of our living novelists, Mr 
 Meredith, evidently expresses to some extent his own views 
 when he makes certain of his characters expatiate on national 
 characteristics, especially contrasting the German and the English. 
 In his pages, Germans talk in Mr Meredith's tongue of " you " 
 and "us," making out Germans, collectively, to be of one habit 
 of mind and action, and Englishmen, collectively, to be of 
 another.^ Mr Meredith, despite a strong tincture of the mili- 
 tarist spirit, has the merit of holding the scales pretty even 
 between the anti-English and the pro-English view, giving us a 
 
 ^ See, in The AdTeniiircs of Harry Ruhnioini, chapter 29, ami compare 
 One of our Conquerors, and Lord Oriiiont and his Aininta, passim. 
 
PREAMBLE. XI 
 
 good deal of each, but rather more of criticism than of patriotism, 
 as an intelligent man had need do. On their merits, however, Mr 
 Meredith's generalisations are rather more arbitrary than even 
 those of somewhat arbitrary nationalists, having perhaps the 
 excessive symmetry which belongs to nearly all presentments 
 of life and thought in fiction. No real German thinker and 
 observer could well have quite such cut-and-dry conceptions of 
 an English genius and a German genius as are heaped upon 
 us by Mr Meredith's Germans. These personages are really 
 dramatic mouthpieces for the novelist's own verdicts, which 
 do but represent the imaginative and epigrammatic play of a 
 tendency that, in minds of a lower order, comes out in more 
 or less absurd docketings of the characters of villages, parishes, 
 towns, counties, provinces, and denominations. Thus it is that 
 the Manxman in Mr Brown's tale of Betsy Lee ^ calls the loblolly 
 boys " Irish curs," when his own Manx dialect proves the largely 
 Irish kinship or derivation of his own people. There is in all 
 of us, in fact, a primordial psychological tendency to simplify 
 the vast labour of judgment in human things, by child-like arti- 
 fices of classification, following on the lines of demarcation 
 which first obtrude themselves. Not only the amateur sociolo- 
 gist — and in sociology the novelist, as such, cannot be more 
 than an amateur without ceasing to be an artist — but the special 
 student of history and institutions, is found resorting at times 
 to this primordial device, against whose seductions there is no 
 safeguard save a vigilant habit of analysis. When the case has 
 been put in this way, with an eye to human nature in general, 
 there may perhaps be less resentment than before set up by the 
 suggestion that the whole tendency is biologically traceable to 
 the kind of blind animal instinct which in general divides dog 
 and cat, while setting up a special friendship between dog and 
 cat of one household, and a further potential enmity between 
 dog and dog. 
 
 It is not to be denied, indeed, that propositions as to race- 
 character are sometimes made not only in complete good faith, 
 but without any semblance of prejudice. Thus Mr Hoffman, the 
 
 ' Fo'c's'le Yams, l88l, p. 54. 
 
Xll PREAMBLE. 
 
 author of an industrious compilation on the negroes of the 
 United States, is found declaring that " there lie at the root of all 
 social difificulties or problems, racial traits and tendencies which 
 make for good or ill in the fate of nations as well as of indi- 
 viduals."^ Yet the work to which this doctrine is prefixed not 
 only gives no proof of such primordial " race tendencies " as it 
 alleges, but on the contrary shews that a race's tendencies are 
 constantly determined by its environment. Here the fallacy is 
 one of uncritical use of terms. And I take leave to offer a similar 
 explanation of the results reached by Mr Grant Allen, when, after 
 impartially enough deciding that probably " not one half the 
 population of the British Isles is really of Teutonic descent " 
 (meaning pure Teutonic descent), he goes on to formulate in the 
 old fashion " our " possession at once of the " Teutonic " qualities 
 of " general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence . . . scientific 
 patience and thoroughness, . . . political moderation and en- 
 durance, . . . impatience of arbitrary restraint," etc., and the 
 "intellectual quickness and emotional nature of the Celt."- In 
 the same breath Mr Allen speaks of the Teutonic differentiation 
 of " our somewhat slow^ and steady character from the more 
 logical but volatile and unstable Gaul." I can see no scientific 
 coherence in these generalisations. To be impatient of arbitrary 
 restraint is not to be enduring ; to be volatile and unstable is to 
 be the reverse of logical ; and if the Celt, as Gaul, be volatile and 
 unstable, that is, impatient, he ought, on Mr Allen's principle of 
 chemical mixture of character, to have given the due proportion of 
 volatility and instability to the " impatient " English blend, where 
 " almost all . . . at the present day possess at least a fraction of 
 Celtic blood." Again, if the volatility and instability of the Gaul 
 go with logicality, it would seem to follow that the lack of them 
 in the Teuton would infer excessive illogicality, which can hardly 
 be compatible with general sobriety and scientific thoroughness. 
 Yet again, if Teutonic mixture so modified Celtic characteristics 
 in Britain, it ought to have similarly modified them in France, 
 
 ^ Race Traits and Tendencies of tJie American Neg7-o, by Fred. L. Hoffman, 
 1896, Preface. (American Economic Association's series of publications. ) 
 " Anglo-Saxon Britain, pp. 228-229. 
 
PREAMBLE. Xlll 
 
 where it certainly took place on a large scale. And yet again, 
 the Gaul, qua Celt, taken as unmodified by Teutonic mixture, 
 ought in the terms of the theory to possess " the Celtic wealth of 
 fancy," " poetry and romance," as well as volatility and instability. 
 But it happens that conventional ethnology credits to the slow 
 and " unimaginative " Teuton of Mr Allen's system a far greater 
 share of " poetry and romance" than it allows to the "Gaul," 
 who, further, is sometimes explained as having been made 
 unpoetical by the large admixture of Norman {i.e. Norse, i.e. 
 Teutonic) blood in the Middle Ages ! So Mr Allen's terms had 
 to be gingerly handled ; and yet withal we have a series of in- 
 consistencies within the scope of his own statement, inconsistent 
 as that further is with other schemata. 
 
 In view of such incoherence, which will be found exemplified 
 in nearly every form of the race-doctrine dealt with in the follow- 
 ing pages, it will at least be allowed to be worth arguing whether 
 the doctrine be not fundamentally fallacious, and whether we 
 ought not to look for the cause of differences of national culture 
 and well-being in institutions, political and other, and for the 
 cause of these in preliminary conditions of environment, natural 
 and political — in anything, in short, rather than in primordial 
 and perpetual qualities of " race." The suggestion may seem 
 the more specious, at least, when it is found that all the methods 
 yet employed to make out a case for one race, as the Teutonic, 
 can be and have been employed to make out a contrary case for 
 the other, as in that very pro-Celtic treatise Tfie A^eiv Exegesis of 
 Shakspere (1859) attributed by M. Littre, in his review of it, to 
 a Mr O'Connell, but fitted to serve, in respect of its utter arbi- 
 trariness of theory, as a " typical " example of a kind of philosophy 
 often held to be peculiarly Teutonic. 
 
 I am well aware that I have against me not only Teutomaniacs 
 and Celtomaniacs in turn, but much cultured opinion, and that 
 I shall be opposed by many who are not only incapable of race 
 animosity in the ordinary sense, but highly cosmopolitan in feel- 
 ing. Even in the felicitous work of Mr W. M. Fullerton on 
 Patriotism and Science, so excellent in temper and intention, I 
 find a variety of assumptions made as to national types of char- 
 
XIV PREAMBLE. 
 
 acter which I cannot always square with my own observation, or 
 indeed with each other. In the same way I find among acute 
 Frenchmen, who profess to reject the hasty theorising of Taine on 
 race, a point of view which for me is not distinguishable from his. 
 Taine made great critical play with a formula of " the race, the 
 environment, the moment," in which " the moment " is sometimes 
 " the time " and sometimes " acquired momentum," so that each 
 factor might at a pinch be any of the others. In the concrete, 
 as I have said elsewhere, Taine's method slumped all sections of 
 the French stock, including the Norman, into one imaginary 
 primary type,^ and so with other nationalities. The closer and 
 harder French students of to-day cast aside these generalisations ; 
 yet they often put others of a similar sort on the same bases. 
 
 There is something disquietingly tenacious in the tendency. 
 Even the late Mr Huxley, who was I think the first powerful 
 and systematic English critic of the ordinary English creed as to 
 " Celt and Teuton," and who has observed that more nonsense, 
 much of it pernicious, has been talked on national character than 
 on any other subject — even he, in repudiating the ordinary way 
 of thinking, so far countenanced it as to say : " Do not let what 
 I have said mislead you into the notion that I disbelieve in the 
 importance of race. I am a firm believer in blood, as every 
 naturalist must be ; and I entertain no doubt that our Iberic 
 forefathers have contributed a something to the making of the 
 modern Englishman totally distinct from the elements whicJi he has 
 inherited from his Aryan forefathers. But ivhich is the Aryan 
 element and which the Iberian, I believe no man can tell ; and he 
 2vho affirms that a?iy quality fieedful for this, that, or the other 
 form of political organisation is present in the one and absent in the 
 other, niakes a statement which I believe to be as baseless in natural 
 science as it is mischievous in politics. I say again that I believe 
 in the immense influence of that fixed hereditary transmission 
 which constitutes a race. I believe it just as I believe in the 
 influence of ancestors upon children. But the character of a man 
 
 1 See, on this, the criticisms of Frederic Morin, Les Iloiiiiiies et Ics Livres 
 Conteiiipomins, 1862, pp. 27-33, and of Emile Hennequin, La Critique 
 Scientifiqiie, 1S88, pp. 93-128. 
 
PREAMBLE. XV 
 
 depends in part upon the tendencies he brought with him into \ 
 the world, and in part upon the circumstances to which he is \ 
 subjected — sometimes one group of influences predominates, 
 sometimes the other. ... If what I have to say in a matter 
 of science weighs with any man who has political power, I ask 
 him to believe that the arguments about the difference between 
 Anglo-Saxons and Celts are a mere sham and a delusion." ^ I 
 confess I cannot see how the politician is to hold steadily by the 
 last teaching if he is also to believe devoutly in the " immense 
 influence of that fixed hereditary transmission which constitutes 
 race"; nor can I feel sure that the sentences above italicised, 
 standing in their context, will ultimately escape such criticism asj' 
 the critic has passed upon other people's doctrine. To allege the i 
 immense and differentiating influence of a factor of which it is ' 
 impossible to recognise either the nature or the results, is to take ■ 
 up a position that seems to fall a good deal short of science. The 
 statement that our " Iberic " ancestors gave us " something totally ' 
 distinct " from what we inherit from our " Aryan " ancestors, im- \ 
 plies that among certain original " Iberians " there were certain \ 
 mental characteristics found in no original "Aryans," and vice \ 
 versa — this though Aryans and Iberians alike had presumptively \ 
 descended from an older stock or species. To me, this proposi- \ 
 tion is unintelligible. I know of no mental characteristic seen _J 
 in any one " race " which is not also seen in others ; and if I 
 believed there were such in " Iberians" and "Aryans " I should 
 be led to surmise that they evolved from different organic be- 
 ginnings. I can only suggest that Mr Huxley had confused 
 physical heredity with mental sameness or continuity, and so held 
 by the latter idea on one side of his thought when he had negated 
 it on the other. The notion of a fixed racial physi(]ue is dealt 
 with at some length in the following pages : here it may suffice 
 to say that the notion of a " totally distinct " racial type of mind, 
 which yet nobody can specify, is quashed in the same breath by 
 ]\Ir Huxley himself, as well as by common sense. 
 
 ' Lecture on The Forefathers and Forerunners of the English People, re- 
 ported in xhc Anthropological Kevirw, April, 1870, p. 203. 
 
XVI PREAMBLE. 
 
 In the passage above quoted from, where I have marked an 
 omission, Mr Huxley gave a notably well-meant if loosely worded 
 counsel to his contemporaries. It runs : "And there is this further 
 truth which lies within every one's observation — that by diligent 
 and careful observation you may help a child to be good and 
 wise and keep it out of evil and folly. But the wisest education 
 cannot ensure its being either good or wise ; while, on the other 
 hand, a few years of perverted ingenuity would suffice to convert 
 the best child that ever lived into a monster of vice and wicked- 
 ness. The like applies to those great children, nations, and their 
 rulers, who are their educators. The most a good government 
 can do is to help its people to be wise and noble, and that mainly 
 by clearing obstacles out of their way. But a thoroughly bad 
 government can debauch and demoralise a people for generations, 
 discouraging all that is good, cherishing all that is evil, until it is 
 as impossible to discover the original nobleness of the stock as 
 it is to find truthfulness and self-restraint in a spoiled and de- 
 moralised child. Let Englishmen ponder these things." May 
 it not be that the somewhat general failure of Englishmen to act 
 in the spirit of this teaching, even in the special application 
 given to it, is partly due to the logical counteraction of it by 
 its context ? 
 
 Where Mr Huxley missed being scientific, it was not to be 
 expected that Mr Arnold should attain to it ; and in fact the 
 race-theories laid down in the charming essay On the Study of 
 Celtic Literatiu-e are among the most arbitrary of its author's 
 doctrines. Finding the poetic formulas of M. Renan on Celtic 
 character inconsistent with many of the facts, he lays down others 
 which are just as inconsistent with other facts ; and in the end 
 we have an account of Celtic and Norman and Cerman types 
 which does but set down every supposed phase of each race's 
 life and mind at a given moment, in the old style, to innate and 
 permanent racial peculiarities, without in the least accounting 
 for the presence of the same phases in the other races, and with- 
 out giving a thought to the explanation set up by differences 
 of culture stage — this though it was the essayist's professed 
 object to induce the races to " transform themselves." Lord 
 
PREAMBLE. XVU 
 
 Strangford's commentary, which upset so much of Mr Arnold's 
 philology, wrought equal havoc with his sociology when it tersely 
 raised the question why Ohthere and Wulfstan did not write in 
 the style which Mr Arnold held to be specifically Teutonic ; 
 and why the modern Dutch do not do so either. Indeed, more 
 theories of Teutonism than Mr Arnold's are made short work 
 of by trying to square them for a moment with the History of 
 Holland. 
 
 And yet again we find the politician, the observant man of 
 the world, failing like the essayist to secure coherence in his 
 estimates of race character. Sir Charles Dilke in one passage, 
 hereinafter quoted, speaks of the Irish as still exhibiting in 
 America the character of a "fierce and easily roused people," 
 and thus constituting a danger for the future.^ Yet in another 
 passage of the same work he writes : " Not only is it a fact known 
 alike to physiologists and statisticians that the children of Irish 
 parents born in America are physically not Irish but Americans, 
 but the like is true of the moral type : the change in this is 
 at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed 
 Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick of thought but slow 
 of speech, whom we have begun to recognise as the latest pro- 
 duct of the Saxon race. . . ."'■^ Here, once more, formulas of 
 race fail us. 
 
 With all these examples of incoherence before me, of course, I 
 can hardly hope that I have escaped inconsistency in the follow- 
 ing chapters. It is indeed difficult to prevent the doctrine that 
 effects of conditions are partly transmissible by heredity, from 
 sounding sometimes like the doctrine that all races have a distinct 
 hereditary character ; and it is difficult to explain the causation 
 of certain defects in a subject race without seeming to give credit 
 for relative perfection to the race which listens. Gustave de 
 Beaumont, in his admirable work Blrlande Sociak, Politique et 
 Religieuse (1S39 and 1863), perhaps the most thorough and con- 
 siderate study ever made by an alien of the troubles of a 
 troublous land — even he sometimes misses his mark by carrying 
 on the business of "apology," in the classic sense of the word, in 
 
 ^ Greater Britain^ 4th ed., 1869, p. 31. - /(/. p. 224. 
 
 b 
 
XVlll PREAMBLE. 
 
 the manner of a criminal-counsel pleading extenuating circum- 
 stances before a jury of sinless middle-class Englishmen, of whose 
 character he accepts the picture drawn by their own newspapers. 
 In this work, however, the risk mainly run is probably the other 
 just mentioned. Perhaps then I can best emphasise the differ- 
 ence between the conceptions of heredity and race character by 
 taking a concrete case. A brilliant Irishman, when subscribing 
 in advance for a copy of this work, wrote : " I trust the book 
 Avill explain ME — if it can." I might say, in answer to my 
 friend, that sociology does not explain individual variations, but 
 only general developments ; but I shall here try to go further. 
 He is a tall " mesocephalic " or " sub-dolichocephalic " reddish- 
 blond, with a Germanic name, and would thus be described by 
 many ethnologists as a descendant of one of the typical Germans 
 of Tacitus, whose intermediate descendants had intermarried only 
 with Teutons. But he has qualities of wit and literary refine- 
 ment and unseriousness and irresponsibility which many people 
 would say are " Celtic " or " un-Teutonic," qualities which some- 
 times suggest Heine and sometimes Goldsmith. I surmise that 
 the character of his ancestors of a thousand or more years ago, 
 whatever their pedigree, has had practically nothing to do with 
 deciding his character ; but that the moral and intellectual 
 conditions and experiences of much nearer ancestors have had a 
 great deal to do with it. And in the last ten generations of 
 Irish life there has been enough of hope and fear, weeping 
 elation and laughing despair, fury and cynicism and defiance and 
 surrender, to produce a crop of " ids " (if I may so pervert 
 Dr Weismann's vocable) that should attune the nerves of a 
 numerous posterity to a subtlety and versatility and instability 
 much seldomer seen among the physically healthy of happier 
 lands, and not likely to be long fully reproduced in a more 
 equable environment. 
 
 Perhaps this is unsound speculation. Perhaps ancestral 
 climate and ancestral whisky count for more in congenital 
 character than ancestral nervous experience. But in the play of 
 all these factors together I see an infinitely more plausible 
 explanation of whatever average variation there may be between 
 
PREAMBLE. XIX 
 
 people and people than is yielded by any theorem of fixed race 
 character going back to " Aryan " and " non-Aryan " foundations, 
 or the soil below these, whether such theorem be Weismannised 
 or not. It only needs to add to these considerations one more. 
 It is a fallacy to conceive of one race or people as " older " 
 than another, in the way many people do when they call China 
 a " decrepit " nationality. The Chinese race or stock is physio- 
 logically no older and no more decrepit than that of the Japanese 
 or the Bulgarians or the Zulus. But a nation , as such may be 
 described as psychologically " young " relatively to another in 
 this sense, that it has mainly subsisted for a long time at a less 
 advanced stage of culture than has been general for a long time 
 in the other. In this sense China may be termed " young " in 
 comparison with Holland. And in a somewhat similar sense 
 Ireland is to be pronounced " young " in comparison with 
 England. So we may say with a good Protestant Irish 
 landlord ^ that some of the faults which are more normal 
 in Ireland than in England are faults of " national youth," 
 a view which perhaps puts them in a more hopeful light 
 than the indurated faults of a world of internecine commerce. 
 For international criticism of the self-conceited and vain-glorious 
 sort always comes home to roost ; and the research for the national 
 faults of the Irish does but reflect a new light on the national 
 faults of the fault-finders. It may be well then, by a thorough 
 ventilation of this one matter, in some measure to clear the air. 
 
 ^ See hereinafter, p. 290. 
 
THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF RACE, i •, ,^, , 
 
 § I. The P/'eseiif Trouble..'-. _ , , ,., . ,o 
 
 The main hindrances to a right treatment of the " Irish prob- 
 lem " by Enghshmen hitherto, apart from mere bUnd aversion 
 to all change, have been two states or habits of mind which 
 have an unlucky tendency to establish each other. One is, the 
 inability of the bulk of the English " ruling class " to under- 
 stand the Irish case on the economic side, their class bias or 
 self-interest shutting out all scientific light : the other is the 
 common English tendency to regard the Irish people, in the 
 lump, as incapable alike of orderly self-government and of 
 industrial development. Men who take the latter view to . 
 start with will naturally fail to reach any idea of a solution of 
 the problem : they place the source of all evil in the faults of 
 national character which they impute, and conceive of no cure 
 save through a cure of these, which they imply to be impossible. 
 On the other hand, men faced by the age-long trouble of Irish 
 discontent, and unready or unable to see the economic side of 
 the explanation, promptly fall back on the theory of " original 
 sin," on phrases about " the Celt," and on the political doctrine 
 called Unionism. That these alternative or complementary forms 
 of feeling set up or strengthen the opposition to Irish Home 
 Rule in nine cases out of ten, is within the knowledge of all 
 practical politicians, though the fact is naturally denied by most 
 Unionists.^ It matters nothing that the latter profess a contrary 
 
 ' I apply this name, not to those who have simply opposed Mr Gladstone's 
 bills as bad measures, but to those who would reject on principle even a 
 scheme of Federal Home Rule. 
 
2 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 or different feeling, when every dispute on the subject brings out 
 the fact that one of the main inspirations of their cause is positive 
 ill-will to the bulk of the people with whom they insist on re- 
 maining so peculiarly "united." So far are even the leaders of 
 the Unionist party from a critical consciousness of their own 
 position, that they have habitually opposed the project of Home 
 Rule on the score that it has been supported only by a majority 
 of English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish together, not by a majority 
 of Englishmen separately. Such a plea is of course the negation 
 of the very principle of union insisted on ; and the fallacy it 
 represents could only be fallen into by men too strongly swayed 
 by an animus to frame for themselves a logical doctrine. 
 
 That there are some men who took up the " Unionist " posi- 
 tion on better grounds, it would of course be unfair to deny. As 
 one of these who, before the sudden change of Mr Gladstone's 
 ;)ol'cy, deprecated ihe Home Rule solution, pointed out its con- 
 ceivable dangers, and pleaded for a solution by way of real 
 union, I have no difficulty in understanding as much. It is 
 moreover obvious to all candid disputants that the very prin- 
 ciple of Home Rule at certain points works logically against 
 simple Nationalism ; the case of Ulster furnished many Liberals 
 with a fair argument against Mr Gladstone's solutions. But it is 
 the hard fate of those who stand on the side of the party of 
 prejudice, that they inevitably take on the colour of their sur- 
 roundings ; and I have seen Celtophobia developed by contagion 
 in men who once seemed incapable of it. The most pathetic 
 illustration I have met with, was supplied by some esteemed 
 Liberal-Unionists in a discussion over this very proposition, that 
 their cause stood for racial malice. They could justly argue, as 
 against the school of uncritical Irish Nationalists, that there are 
 abundant sources of evil in Irish conditions apart from English 
 interference. But they took the further line of denying that ill- 
 will to " the Celt " had ever been common in England, and 
 asserted that, on the contrary, while Irishmen in England are 
 allowed free scope for all their powers, the Irish Nationalists aim 
 at the exclusion of Englishmen from Ireland. For this last 
 assertion, the sole justification was the bare citation of the current 
 phrase, " Ireland for the Irish," Now, everybody knows that 
 that phrase is simply a short way of putting the claim that the 
 laws specially affecting Irish life shall be made by the Irish 
 people, through an Irish Parliament. It is surely too idle to 
 pretend that a party of whose leading members many are settled 
 in England, intending to remain there for life, has any idea of 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 3 
 
 setting up a war of reprisals which would injure a hundred Irish- 
 men for one Englishman, When Liberal-Unionists, then, come 
 to be capable of thus representing the case, we are bound to 
 conclude that their environment has acted on their temperament 
 to the point of making them develop race prejudice, even if 
 they set out as fair reasoners. 
 
 There is, in fact, no alternative open to them save that be- 
 tween embitterment and disillusionment. Those of us who, 
 before 1883, hoped to see the problem solved by a really 
 "unionist" policy, had only to wait till 1886 to see that we had 
 hoped for too much. It then became clear that not only the 
 bulk of the English people, but those who specially stand for 
 " the Union," are essentially incapable of unionistic politics. 
 True unionism would mean the cordial deliberation of all four 
 elements of the House of Commons — English, Scotch, Irish, and 
 Welsh — on all questions which come before them, whether Irish, 
 Welsh, Scotch, or English. But the majority of the English 
 members never disguise, and never have disguised, that Irish 
 and Scotch and Welsh questions are for them either a bore or 
 a nuisance, and that they only deal with them perforce. The 
 recurrence of an Irish problem every few years they regard as 
 an unwarrantable strain on their patience. They sit through or 
 vote upon Irish debates because party pressure makes them ; 
 they deal with the question of ^Velsh Disestablishment because 
 they cannot help it ; they gladly leave Scotch questions, wher- 
 ever the whips permit it, to be dealt with by the Scotch members 
 at the close of the Session. In this state of things the parade of 
 Unionism is a farce. Englishmen, it must be plainly said, are 
 in the lump incapable of a real legislative union with provinces 
 whose domestic problems need separate legislative treatment. I 
 do not say this by way of invective. It is simply a sociological 
 fact which ought to be reckoned with by practical politicians. 
 And it follows from this fact, that even a well-meaning English 
 effort to unite Ireland with England under the present constitu- 
 tion must end either in confession of miscalculation or in 
 irrational embitterment against Ireland, as a gratuitously froward 
 nation. Many Englishmen have thus indignantly decided, with 
 regard to Ireland, that " the dog, to gain his private ends, went mad, 
 and bit the man." When we turn to what ought to be the most 
 rational statement of the " Unionist " case against Home Rule, that 
 of a University Professor of Law, we find, breaking intermittently 
 through the surface of quasi-scientific argument, gasps of the 
 mere rage of race-prejudice and faction. The voice of the Irish 
 
4 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 majority, Mr Dicey tells us, " is the voice of Ireland in the same 
 sense in which a century ago the shouts or yells of the Jacobin 
 Club were the voice of France." ^ The Parnell movement, as a 
 whole, is for Mr Dicey a " base conspiracy." ^ When the pro- 
 fessedly cool and qualified spokesman of the cool and self-con- 
 trolled race takes this tone, the degree of coolness and self- 
 control of his faction in general can be readily estimated.^ 
 
 The situation is thus in some respects less hopeful, more 
 embittered, than it was thirty or fifty years ago. The pseudony- 
 mous Irish author of a work on the Irish problem fifty years ago, 
 could say that " the enlightened English of every sect acknow- 
 ledge that the Irish have always been an oppressed and injured 
 people : they value their generous efforts in the great cause of 
 civil and religious liberty ; and they wish for the establishment of 
 a lasting friendship between the two countries, whose energies and 
 industry should always render them emulous of each other, but 
 who have been made almost enemies by the detestable policy of 
 interested and corrupt statesmen." ^ And Mr John George 
 MacCarthy of Cork, writing his excellent work on the land 
 question in 1870, could say that "the Pall Mall Gazette and 
 other leading journals have repeatedly and reasonably asked 
 Irishmen to tell clearly and quietly what they wish in reference to 
 the Irish land questions, and for what reasons they wish it." We 
 are to-day in a less wholesome atmosphere. In the generation 
 from 1840 to 1870, whatever were the policy of English states- 
 men, the literary lead in such matters lay with the school of Mill, 
 the school of reason and science. To-day we have gone distinctly 
 backwards. Since 1880 there has been much Celtophobic writing 
 by distinguished literary men ; the opportunist politics of Mr 
 Gladstone has ended in a marked reaction ; and though as of old 
 there is small sign of political wisdom or knowledge on the 
 Conservative side, there is plenty of literary prestige. It seems 
 as if the ten years of adroit aggression in Parliament and in the 
 constituencies by the Nationalist party under Mr Parnell, the 
 
 1 A Leap in the Dark, by A. V. Dicey, 1893, p. 147. 
 
 2/^., p. 137. 
 
 " It is instructive to note that in 1893 Mr Dicey pointed to the demand for 
 an amnesty for imprisoned dynamiters as one of the aspects of the Irish 
 cause which proved the unfitness of Irish Nationalists to wield any executive 
 power. Now (1896) the dynamiters have been released by the Unionist 
 Government, by way of buying Irish votes. 
 
 ^ Ireland as a Kingdom and a Colony, by " Brian Borohme the Younger," 
 1843. 
 
 < 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 5 
 
 anger roused by dynamite outrages, and the excitement of the 
 final right-about-face of Mr Gladstone, had together roused 
 dormant elements of unreason in the English people. 
 
 It is true that the tactical exigencies of the situation have 
 modified alike the stolid refusal of the English majority to deal 
 with the economic Irish problem on its merits, and the tendency 
 to meet all Irish protest with primitive insult. One tentative 
 Land Bill after another has carried us so far from the old position 
 of laissez-faire, that we see a Conservative Government quarrel 
 with the Irish landlords in the interests of the Ulster tenants, 
 whom it fears to drive over to the side of Home Rule ; and the 
 comradeship of " loyal " Irish in general has imposed on Anglican 
 prejudice some restraint of aspersion against " the Celt." None 
 the less, the two hindrances remain. English curative legislation, 
 above all Conservative legislation, is always behind the develop- 
 ment of the economic problem, which of necessity modifies from 
 year to year with the changing economic conditions ; and English 
 sentiment will always tend to be -strongly anti-Irish so long as 
 Irishmen lay their troubles at England's door, as they certainly 
 will do till they have Home Rule. New expressions of the old 
 animus against " the Celt " crop up every little while ; and there 
 is in circulation a mass of literature which was designed to 
 inoculate it ; while, religious fanaticism has been developed in 
 Ulster to a degree that a century ago would have been thought 
 impossible, and has been thence diligently spread in England 
 and Scotland. If there is to be any escape from the dead- 
 lock, then, it must seemingly be through Englishmen learning 
 to see, in larger numbers than of old, that the Celtophobic 
 explanation of the trouble, the theory of Celtic incapacity, is 
 mere barbaric absurdity ; that the religious feud is something 
 still worse ; and that if Irishmen are in more constant social 
 trouble than their neighbours, it must be either because they 
 are not free to manage their own affairs now, or because they 
 have been kept deplorably backward by outside interference in 
 the past. And to prove this afresh is the object of the following 
 pages. 
 
 § 2. English and Irish. 
 
 The question might be simplified if, before proceeding to 
 examine historically "the Irish character," we meet iMiglish 
 accounts of it (i) by the admission that it certainly exhibits 
 faults, and (2) by the question whether Englishmen really sup- 
 
6 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 pose themselves, as a nation, to be anything Hke faultless. That 
 they make some such assumption might be seriously taken for 
 granted, if it were not that one half of the English nation, broadly 
 speaking, is chronically denouncing the other half as unprincipled, 
 dishonourable, treacherous, and unfit to exercise political power. 
 According to the party of Mr Balfour and Mr Chamberlain, the 
 party of Lord Rosebery is a traitorous faction, either incapable 
 of sane political action or shamelessly bent on sacrificing the 
 highest interests of the nation to the mere lust of place and 
 power. But the very framers of this indictment urge on the 
 very faction indicted that they ought not to give Home Rule 
 to Irish Nationalists, because these in turn are unfit for political 
 power. On the principles laid down, the whole " Gladstonian " 
 party are equally unfit, and ought to have been disfranchised. 
 It seems impossible to doubt that the general charge against 
 the " Gladstonians " is not believed-in by those who make it. 
 Then, if that is but a fashion of speech, is the charge against 
 Irish character believed-in by those who make it ? Perhaps the 
 complete explanation is that Conservatives would gladly dis- 
 franchise Liberals if they could, but, not caring to venture on 
 such a proposal, content themselves with affirming the unfitness 
 for self-rule of the race with which they profess to keep " united " 
 on terms of " equality " ; thus expressing to its full extent their 
 twofold temper of hostility to the alien and to the opponent. 
 
 That Irish Nationalists are " traitors," is the beginning and 
 end of the reasoning of many English Unionists, who find their 
 fit poets in Mr Swinburne and Mr Kipling ; and it falls to be 
 said that if we are to pronounce logically, from the Kipling point 
 of view, on any citizen's fitness for self-government, those poli- 
 ticians themselves must be reckoned about as unfit as any one 
 not under restraint can well be. They represent the spirit of 
 civil strife at an extreme strain ; being really further from true 
 "loyalty" to the constitution than the Nationalists they vituperate. 
 Constitutions obviously exist just because men are quarrelsome 
 and unreasonable. Wise men would not need any ; and to argue 
 that any amount of frowardness disentitles one's neighbours to 
 exercise fuller self-government is to be at least as froward as they 
 are alleged to be. To say that for self-government we need great 
 wisdom is to shew little ; for when men are really wise all round 
 they will need no government whatever. As it is, with wisdom 
 but scantily developed in most of us, loyalty to constitutional 
 government consists in accepting without indecent fury any turn 
 of affairs decided on by the majority. In brief. Irishmen cannot 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 7 
 
 possibly be more unfit for Home Rule than the Englishmen in 
 question are for Union. 
 
 But this conclusion, however logically drawn, will of course 
 not recommend itself to any one with Conservative sympathies ; 
 and persuasion must take a more concrete form if it can take 
 any. And the best way to begin seems to be by asking English- 
 men, in all seriousness, whether there are any faults in the Irish 
 character which do not exist in their own in varying degrees. 
 Quaintly enough, many of them point to the quarrelsomeness of 
 Irish politicians among themselves as a proof of their unfitness 
 for self-rule, when it is actually only the quarrelsomeness of 
 English poUticians that has kept the existing Irish party on the 
 stretch up to the point of developing disastrous strife within its 
 own ranks. Had not the English Liberal party earlier split up, 
 as the Parnellite party did later, Home Rule would have been 
 carried ere now, and the Parnellite party first split on a rock that 
 would have shivered any English party whatever. It is true that 
 the Conservative party has, in general, less internal strife than the 
 Liberal, the reason being, not any wisdom or self-restraint among 
 its members, but the fact that they are united mainly in order to 
 prevent any Liberal legislation ; whereas Liberals, having among 
 them a great variety of plans, tend to divide on these.^ But no 
 English Conservative leader of modern times could have held his 
 party together any better than did Mr Parnell, if he had person- 
 ally figured in similar circumstances. 
 
 We shall deal later with the historical aspects of the com- 
 parison between the two races, so called ; but it may be profit- 
 able at the outset to press it a little further as regards our own 
 generation. When anti-Irish Englishmen are not speaking of 
 Irish quarrelsomeness, they are heard to call Irishmen unstable 
 and untruthful. The latter charge seems peculiarly supererogatory, 
 when we remember that at any moment the leaders of parties in 
 England are confidently believed to be untruthful by myriads of 
 the opposite side. Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen have 
 habitually regarded Mr Gladstone as a prevaricator. Hundreds 
 of thousands more have rather more confidently taken the same 
 view of his antagonists. Lords Beaconsfield and Salisbury. Mr 
 Chamberlain cannot possibly be more convinced of the untrust- 
 worthiness of the Irish members with whom he used to plot, 
 than multitudes of his own countrymen are convinced of his. 
 
 ^ Now that we have a Coalition Ministry, with a variety of plans for 
 activity, the principle of discord at once comes into fresh play in the coalition 
 ranks. 
 
8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 It seems, therefore, quite idle to discuss the question of Irish 
 truthfulness. It can hardly matter, for purposes of practical 
 politics. I would only note in passing, first, that Englishmen 
 in the mass are pronounced perfidious by large numbers of 
 Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians ; secondly, that so early as 
 the fourteenth century, Petrarch, when assigning the qualities 
 of the nations in the entertaining way in which those things 
 were done then as now, pronounced " craftiness " to be the 
 special English characteristic ; and, thirdly, that an accomplished 
 and thoughtful Englishman who lived a great deal in France, the 
 late Mr P. G. Hamerton, seemed to be somewhat of Petrarch's 
 opinion. This is what he says ^ on the subject of comparative 
 lying, French and English. 
 
 " I notice ... a difference in kind and quality between French and 
 English lying. The French are daring enough, but they are not really 
 clever in the art. They have much audacity, but little skill. They 
 will say what is not true with wonderful decision, and they will stick 
 to it afterwards ; but the English surpass them infinitely in craft and 
 guile. The typical French lie is a simple, shameless invention ; the 
 typical English lie is not merely half a truth ; it is entangled with half- 
 a-dozen truths, or semblances of truth, so that it becomes most diffi- 
 cult to separate them. . . ." 
 
 After this, surely, the question of comparative truthfulness had 
 better be dropped among us. The scientific fact seems to be 
 that we all — all nations, that is — lie more or less, some in 
 haste, some otherwise. 
 
 But the question of temperamental instability is worth discuss- 
 ing seriously. " Hysteria " used to be charged against Irishmen 
 in the lump by some Englishmen, before " Ulsteria " became so 
 epidemic : the phrase " the blind hysterics of the Celt " is one 
 of the late Lord Tennyson's contributions to sociology. It 
 happened that he was in his own politics, as in his philosophy 
 of life,- one of the most hysterical men of genius of his time ; 
 some of his leading competitors in that character being men of 
 his own political way of thinking, as Mr Carlyle and Dr Tyndall. 
 Put it is not necessary to rest here on a mere tii quoque : for it 
 can be demonstrated that almost all the well-known English men 
 of letters who in recent times have taken it upon them to expose 
 the instability of the Irish character are themselves, to the medical 
 
 ' French and English, 18S9, p. 186. 
 
 - Compare The Two Voices and hi Mevioriam, in which the final problems 
 of philosophy are disposed of in terms of mere hysteria. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 9 
 
 and to the critical eye, visibly hysterical. Kingsley, who was 
 one of the first prophets of the " Teutonic forefather " gospel in 
 England ; who made even sentimental patriots wince by his oracle, 
 " the hosts of our (Teutonic) forefathers were the hosts of God " ; 
 and who aspersed the character of the Irish in mass, was, I sup- 
 pose, the most flagrantly hysterical type in all modern literature. 
 He seemed incapable of writing a page save in a tumult of 
 hysteria ; so that even the charm and the sincerity of his 
 character cannot save much of his writing from being nauseous ; 
 and the constant affectation of strength cannot disguise the real 
 weakness. And he has many congeners, of his own and other 
 ethical schools. Take, after Mr Carlyle and Dr Tyndall, such 
 distinguished writers as Mr Froude, Mr Goldwin Smith, Mr 
 Swinburne, and Mr Kipling. Mr Froude and Mr Smith are 
 dealt with separately in another part of this volume, for such 
 readers as may demand rigorous demonstration ; but I fancy 
 that any really cool-headed and critical reader will admit at once 
 that they are emphatically hysterical types, incapable of con- 
 sistency, vacillating, blusterous, gustily sentimental, childishly 
 self-contradictory, in a word, weakly emotional where for just 
 judgment or wise counsel there is needed a high degree of sanity 
 and coherence. As for Mr Kipling, his way of dealing with 
 Irish matters, where meant to be funny, is lamentable, and where 
 meant to be serious is very funny. This writer unconsciously 
 typifies, with a success worthy of his own genius for type-drawing 
 (to which I have pleasure in bearing here an impartial testi- 
 mony), the extreme simplicity of the mental processes of his party. 
 AMiatsoever race happens at any moment to be the object of Mr 
 Kipling's patriotic distrust is conceived of by him as consisting in 
 mass of cads and cowards. Thus in one story he triumphantly 
 presents an excessively caddish Russian officer as a type of every- 
 thing Russian : there is no admission of possible exceptions. 
 Natives of India in the mass, barring the specially warlike tribes, 
 are commonly presented by him as cowards ; but when in the 
 tale a hysterical native prince, in the fulness of his loyalty to Her 
 Majesty, goes as far as even after-banquet decorum will permit 
 in the way of insulting the solitary Russian officer, Mr Kipling 
 gleefully presents him as a hero who will be of value on the 
 English side in what Mr Lang eloquently calls "that dreadful 
 battle drawing nigh, to thunder through the Afghan passes 
 sheer." So with Mr Kipling's treatment of the Irish problem. 
 So long as Irishmen are content to fight for "the Queen, God 
 bless her," Mr Kipling joyously recognises their merits. Mul- 
 
lO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 vaney is his favourite soldier. But inasmuch as most Irishmen 
 choose to work for Home Rule, and some of them commit brutal 
 outrages, Mr Kipling sees, with the eye of genius, that the 
 tendency to certain specific forms of outrage is hereditary in the 
 stock ; and so he constructs for us the pleasing tale of the 
 Thibetan offspring of a disaffected Irish soldier who spontane- 
 ously take to cutting off cows' tails by night to avenge themselves 
 in a quarrel. If only there had been any strong movement for 
 Home Rule in the Scotch Highlands, with some of the crimes 
 which follow on intense agrarain discontent, we should doubtless 
 have had from Mr Kipling a similar tale concerning the Scottish 
 Celt, as an offset to the study of " The Drums of the Fore and 
 Aft," where the Celts are perhaps a little too favourably con- 
 trasted with the unlucky regiment of raw English. Mr Kipling 
 can adjust his muse to most exigencies. When the late Mr 
 Parnell, in his overbalanced contempt for English opinion, was 
 reckless enough to meet a piece of cross-examination on an old 
 speech with the remark that on a particular occasion he had 
 perhaps " sought to deceive the House," Mr Kipling rose to 
 heights of moral indignation where the Nonconformist conscience 
 itself could scarcely breathe, and delivered a withering sermon in 
 verse on the subject. One is disposed to meet it by asking Mr 
 Kipling whether Mr Parnell was not as much entitled to latitude 
 of exposition as he ? Is all the deceit to be on the EngHsh side ? 
 Might it not suggest itself to a man with some sense of humour, 
 and some eye for courage, that Mr Parnell did but show himself 
 a stronger man than the unavowed prevaricators on the other 
 side of the dispute ? Is Mr Parnell's method so peculiar, in 
 comparison with Lord Salisbury's direction to Lord Lytton to 
 " make a pretext," in his dealings with Afghanistan ; or with the 
 systematic prevarication of the Foreign Office in Parliament on 
 such a matter as the invasion of the Soudan ? 
 
 The spectacle of Mr Kipling's political and ethnological pro- 
 paganda leads us to a conclusion which it is often profitable to 
 keep in mind — that a great deal of harm can be done in the 
 world by irrational men of genius. For there is such a thing as 
 irrational genius, as there is such a thing as witty stupidity ; and 
 both forces play a great part in most political strifes. In the 
 case of Mr Swinburne, therefore, we may let the ascription of 
 genius pass without qualification, leaving his verse in the mass 
 to those who think it great poetry, only pointing out that of the 
 several qualities which can fitly secure for the political opinions 
 of a poet or anyone else a title to respect, Mr Swinburne's 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. I I 
 
 poetry exhibits at most one — that of enthusiasm. Of wisdom 
 or weight of character, of measure, of decent self-restraint, of 
 gravity of reflection on disturbing themes, no EngUsh poet has 
 ever given less sign. Furious abuse of Frenchmen in the mass, 
 after loud laudation of Frenchmen in the mass ; unworthy abuse 
 of Walt Whitman after fervent acclamation of Walt Whitman ; 
 these are among the later illustrations Mr Swinburne has given 
 us of his stability and his sense. If Irishmen lack strength, and 
 self-control, and constancy, they are hardly to be convicted of it 
 by the author of "Songs before Sunrise." 
 
 For many readers, it must be quite unnecessary to press these 
 unpleasant points. Men with any turn for discrimination must 
 have noted how little of solidity or strength enters into most 
 literary proclamations of the greatness of English character ; how 
 much of windy weakness there is in the English rhetoricians who 
 ascribe to weakness of character the misfortunes of the Irish 
 people. Even on the Unionist side, the championship of Mr 
 Froude and Mr Swinburne must cause some misgivings. And 
 as regards the interference of poets in political disputes generally, 
 the recent exhibitions of the Poet Laureate have done something 
 to bring home to the public mind the fact that though a poet may 
 happen to be inspired by a good cause, he is no better a judge 
 of causes than anybody else ; and that the opinion of the Poet 
 Laureate on political problems has no more special weight than 
 that of the President of the Royal Academy, or the head of the 
 Academy of Music. But if we are to judge the frame of mind 
 of the English majority by the general run of the literature of 
 Unionism, we cannot escape the conviction that these outcries 
 of primitive passion and prejudice find a ready echo and 
 applause among a multitude similarly disposed, and thus tend 
 to fix and worsen a state of mind which, being often entered 
 into with youthful haste or in momentary exasperation, might 
 otherwise yield to criticism and reflection. So the spirit of racial 
 malice persists : indeed, the very nature of the dispute tends to 
 foster it. It is almost inevitable that there should still be attacks 
 by Irishmen on English character in the lump ; and such attacks 
 would produce rejoinders in the lump, even if there were not 
 still the English disposition to make the aggression. Matters 
 which, to a considerate eye, are in nowise proofs of deficiency 
 in Irish character, are often founded on as justifying English 
 disrespect. The composition of the Irish Nationalist party or 
 parties, for instance, is often pointed to as proving a low level of 
 (lualification for political life in Ireland. Now, so far are the 
 
 1 
 
12 THE SAXON AND THE CELT, 
 
 shortcomings of the Nationalist party from justifying such a verdict, 
 it may rather be said in fairness that in the circumstances the 
 composition of that party did great credit to the Home Rule 
 cause. The English Conservative party draws freely for its 
 representation on the educated and monied leisure class, whose 
 interests are mostly maintained by Conservatism : it numbers 
 scores of university men, and hundreds of men of large incomes, 
 among its parliamentary representatives. The Irish Nationalist 
 party on the other hand, being the party of the peasantry, had 
 almost no countenance from the educated and monied leisure 
 class in Ireland, which is proportionally so much smaller to 
 begin with, and had to draw its representatives from the ranks of 
 its unmonied adherents, being able to offer them only the some- 
 what precarious support derivable from the subscriptions of the 
 Irish race to the cause. Further, during Mr Parnell's life the 
 party was certainly ruled in Parliament with a high hand. 
 Strong and capable Irishmen, accordingly, might well hesitate 
 to become parliamentary members of the Nationalist party even 
 when they thoroughly sympathised with it, preferring to earn a 
 surer income and play a freer part outside. Yet, withal, the 
 party got together a number of representatives of good debating 
 power, and despite some ruffianism the average of capacity and 
 character was respectable ; whereas in the large and rich English 
 Conservative party the proportion of members of good debating 
 power is very small, and the general level of capacity is noticeably 
 low ; to say nothing of the fact that that party in the past has 
 given abundant proofs of its capacity for ruffianism. The general 
 level of parliamentary capacity in any community can be properly 
 tested only by establishing payment of members. It seems 
 likely that if that existed in the United Kingdom, the Irish 
 Nationalist party in Parliament would compare very well, man 
 for man, with any other, save in the matter of leaders, who can 
 only be made by long experience. 
 
 The strifes of the Irish Nationalist party after Mr Parnell's 
 death, finally, while sufficiently unfortunate for the cause, are no 
 extraordinary phenomena. They might even have been predicted. 
 The organisation of the party by Mr Parnell was premature in 
 the measure in which it was arbitrary : the dominance of one 
 man, in this as in other fields of political action, is the worst of 
 all securities for future harmonious procedure among the persons 
 dominated. Disunion among Irish Nationalists after Mr Parnell's 
 death was as natural as disunion among English Commonwealth 
 men after Cromwell's death ; and if the one phenomenon prove 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 1 3 
 
 political incapacity, so does the other. The German Socialist 
 party at this moment are only withheld from internal strife by 
 the severe pressure of the police laws against them. A self- 
 governing and harmoniously co-operating party can only be built 
 up by a lengthened tentative process ; and Englishmen of any 
 party must be singularly oblivious of their own political history if 
 they see anything out-of-the-way in the dissensions of the Irish 
 party as recently constituted, and as recently perturbed. It is 
 merely the determined injustice of faction that can let English- 
 men at this time of day fall back, as so many do, on the 
 formula that the Nationalists were only held together by the 
 Saxon domination of Mr Parnell, and have proved the unwork- 
 ableness of an Irish Parliament. This line of argument, follow- 
 ing on former dialectic, leads to awkward results. While Mr 
 Parnell held his party together, he was habitually vilified by his 
 English antagonists as a liar. Now that he is dead, they describe 
 him as a " born leader of men," who was so in virtue of his Saxon 
 descent. It does not seem to strike these ethnologists that they 
 are now committed to the following twofold proposition : — 
 
 Mr Parnell was of purely English stock and English type. 
 
 Mr Parnell was a liar and trickster in politics. 
 From which it would seem to follow once more that unveracity is 
 not an Irish or " Celtic " specialty, and that the philosophy of 
 race-malice is a very risky weapon. 
 
 Still it is not to be hoped, of course, that these considerations 
 will suffice to upset the fallacy of race prejudice in minds where 
 it has long held sway. It is too old and too common a form of 
 error to be readily discredited even by obvious logical rebuttals. 
 The most discouraging fact in the case is the frequent reappear- 
 ance and persistence of the fallacy, in its crudest form, among 
 men with far more pretension to science than the average English 
 Conservative, and in countries where better things might have 
 been looked for. Though the war of 1870 did much to develop 
 sanity of international estimate among Frenchmen, I have heard 
 men of that nation, above the average in culture, express a quite 
 naif sense of the superiority of their race in hereditary qualities to 
 the Italian. And whereas at the beginning of this century, and 
 even after the fall of Napoleon, there had seemed to exist among 
 historians and sociological writers in Germany a very general 
 superiority to the vulgar instincts of racial malice and racial 
 conceit, these instincts have since exhibited themselves, above 
 all since 1870, more abundantly and more crudely in German 
 historical literature than in any other. Sometimes it is merely 
 
14 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 France that is disparaged ; sometimes it is " the Latin races," 
 so-called, that are comprehensively convicted of decadence. But 
 the old dogma of innate racial qualities seems the favourite 
 standing-ground. The doctrine of an innate and primordial 
 excellence in the " Teutonic " character, and of an innate and 
 primordial inferiority in the " Celtic " character — the latter being 
 exemplified by France, and the former by United Germany 
 (Austria not counting) — this teaching has, for a generation back, 
 been flaunted with such crudity of arrogance, such fatuity of 
 dogmatism, by a number of German writers of good repute as 
 serious students of history, that it has become a little difficult for 
 even an impartial outsider to escape the kindred hallucination of 
 regarding Germany in the mass as thus fatuous ; to remember 
 that there, as elsewhere, there are sane and cosmopolitan thinkers 
 and teachers, who recognise the importance of all civilised nations 
 to each other's culture and well-being, and turn their backs on 
 the blatancy of animal instinct which calls itself patriotism.^ 
 
 There have been, and doubtless still are, Englishmen of the 
 Teutomaniacal school who are well-pleased with these German 
 demonstrations against France. Among the general run of 
 English anti-Celticists, however, there is a prudent recoil from 
 such lengths of consistency. Those who find the root of all 
 Irish evil in the Celticity of the Celt are fain to surmise that 
 the frugal and prosperous peasantry of France must be somehow 
 non-Celtic, in order to account for its success. Those who know 
 " Celtic " Brittany, too, have noted that there is, as one French 
 ethnologist has put it, an "astonishing difference" between the 
 average Breton and the average Irish temperament, the first so 
 often grave and restrained, the second so often light-hearted and 
 brilliant. The French, accordingly, are classed in mass, by some 
 of our worst Celtophobes, in some other category, many count- 
 ing them Teutons, on the score of the Germanic quality of the 
 Franks. Yet the German patriots above characterised continue 
 to speak of France very much as our Unionists speak of Ireland. 
 A glance at the Franco-German controversy, then, may be a not 
 unprofitable preliminary to a brief scrutiny of the whole racial 
 question, which alone seems likely to shake the confidence of our 
 amateur ethnologists in their simple solutions of sociological 
 problems. 
 
 ■* For instance, the late Professor Curtius, whose tone contrasted nobly with 
 that of some of his fellow-historians. And one who can hardly be called a 
 "sane" teacher, Nietsche, has sharply countered the current tone of Germap 
 self-praise. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 1 5 
 
 § 3. French atid Germans. 
 
 In the classic works of historical science produced in France 
 last century, there is little or no sign of any belief in any special 
 qualities of race persisting independently of the influences of 
 civilisation in general, and of institutions in particular. In the 
 seventeenth century there had been a good deal of discussion 
 among scholars as to the pedigree of the ancient Gauls, some 
 insisting that the classical descriptions proved them to be Germans, 
 others showing that their language was clearly non-Germanic.^ 
 After the philological discussion had died down, there was 
 established a certain official doctrine as to the Germanic origin 
 of the Kingdom of modern France ; but to any ethnological im- 
 plications of that doctrine the new rationalists were substantially 
 indifferent. The two main works of Montesquieu are written 
 not so much in contradiction as in disregard of any thesis of 
 racial heredity ; his treatise on the rise and decay of the Roman 
 power being a study of the reactions of institutions ; while the 
 Esprit des Lois recognises physiological causation only in respect 
 of the influence on character which it attributes to climate. He 
 speaks of " our fathers the ancient Germans," - accepting the 
 current academic view ; and there he lets the matter stand. In 
 Voltaire's Essai sur les ATcenrs, again, there is no suggestion that 
 nations, as such, have unchangeable idiosyncrasies, good or bad. 
 The cosmopolitan attitude of the French philosophic school was 
 averse to any such supposition. They bore no ill-will to Prussia 
 for the victories of Frederick, any more than to England for the 
 victories of Marlborough. Looking and working for a reign of 
 reason, they saw brothers in the enlightened men of all countries ; 
 and while they of course noted social differences, paid compli- 
 ments to foreign excellences, jested at foreign imperfections, and 
 admitted of a certain patriotic pride, such as is seen in Voltaire's 
 Siecle de Louis XLV., they never made their philosophy an instru- 
 ment of race prejudice. It is fair to say that they had little 
 temptation to do so. Montesquieu and Voltaire in particular 
 were read with admiration throughout Europe ; ultra-Protestant 
 Scotland sat at their feet in the persons of a whole school of 
 historical students ; and Frederick the Great, so far from repre- 
 senting any Teutomania, read and wrote only French ; while the 
 
 ^ See Roget, Baron de Belloguet, Ethnoghiic Gatiloise, Ptie. 1., Glossairc 
 Gattlois, 1858, p. 19, sq. ; and Holzmann, Kclten ttnd Gcnnaiicn, Stuttgart, 
 1855, S. 2, sq., for sketches of the old dispute. 
 
 ^ Esprit des Lois, \. vi., ch. 18 ; 1. xiv. , ch. 14. 
 
1 6 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Berlin Royal Society astonished Goldsmith by carrying on its 
 transactions in that language. Only in the acrid criticisms of 
 Corneille's and Voltaire's tragedies by I.essing do we thus far 
 catch the note of race prejudice, in the implication that there is 
 a question of German versus French bound up with every question 
 of artistic method, and in the unconcealed resentment at the 
 vogue of French taste in Germany.^ 
 
 It was inevitable, however, that, in the awakening of socio- 
 logical speculation set up by such writers as Montesquieu, Vol- 
 taire, and Rousseau, the old conception of race characteristics 
 should be revived ; and as a matter of fact we find it developed 
 elaborately enough in the anonymous treatise La Physique de 
 VHistoire, ou Considerations generales stir les Principes elhnentaires 
 du Temperament et du Caractere natiirel des Peuples, published in 
 1765. There, as in nearly all the philosophical treatises of the 
 time, the position taken up is avowedly deistic ; the writer even 
 professes Christianity ; but the Biblical account of things is nO' 
 less avowedly set aside : and the writer seeks in the knowledge 
 and the quasi-scientific lore of his time a naturalistic explanation, 
 first of differences of aspect in races, and then of differences of 
 temperament. He rejects the fantastic theory of Maupertuis '' 
 that the " first mother " may have been created with a store of 
 "ova of different colours," destined to evolve in different orders,, 
 so that one day the white ova of Europe may give out, and the 
 white races change colour, and vice versa with the black. Insist- 
 ing on the simplicity of Nature, the essayist supplies a schema 
 which certainly has that quality, his short and simple doctrine 
 being that, as there are three main Zones, the northern, the 
 southern, and the temperate, so there are three corresponding 
 temperaments, the northern being (somehow) " hot " as well as. 
 "humid," the southern "dry" and "phlegmatic," while the 
 temperate represents a golden mean. In practice, there results 
 thoughtless violence among the northerns, adroitness in sub- 
 stitution for force among the southerns, and a due balance of 
 tendencies among the midway populations. The endless difii- 
 
 1 "That a German should think for himself," jeers Lessing in the Drama- 
 ttirgie {§ 32), "that of himself he should have the audacity to doubt of the 
 superiority of a Frenchman — who can imagine such a thing?" The soreness 
 thus expressed was, of course, not new in German life (see for instance, a 
 citation in Ernest Newman's Gliick and the Opera, 1895, p. 216); but it is with 
 Lessing that it first begins to make itself widely felt in literature. August 
 von Schlegel carries it on. 
 
 2 p'emis Physique, Plie H., ch. 2. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 1 7 
 
 culties which the essayist's classification sets up are successively 
 disposed of by jugglings with the machinery of climate and " the 
 humours " ; and when he comes to the chronic charge of " fickle- 
 ness " against the French he sagaciously explains ^ that the hot 
 and humid northern temperament lacks " vivacity of soul," the 
 senses being vehement, but the intelligence sluggish ; while the 
 dry temperament of the south causes an excess of reflection, and 
 so a lack of decision. The two opposite conditions of the 
 humours thus make northerns and southerns alike unfitted for 
 prompt action ; hence their unjust imputation of levity to the 
 midway French, who are neither sluggish nor over-calculating, 
 but just prompt enough. It all constitutes an entertaining 
 sample of the nationalist prepossession. Yet with all its naivete 
 the argument at times puts on a philosophic face, as in the plea - 
 that nations are mutually complementary in the scheme of things, 
 aiding each other by difference of function as do individuals in 
 any one society ; and in the concluding decision, chiming with 
 that of Anacharsis, that the power of reason and law may over- 
 ride all physical influences. 
 
 Such a fluctuating body of sentiment, however, even apart from 
 the obvious incoherence of its physiological system of " humours," 
 could not long hold the ground ; and accordingly, when later the 
 revived nationalist prejudice in France took a definite shape, it 
 was in more concrete theses, such as that of the renowned La 
 Tour d'Auvergne, who, scholar as well as warrior, and equally in 
 earnest in both pursuits, undertook to show that the people of his 
 beloved Brittany were the true descendants of the ancient Gauls, 
 and that not only was their language the ancient Gallic, but it 
 was more ancient than Latin, which derived many words from it. 
 His work, which though extravagant is not without merit, revived 
 older researches ^ and stimulated new. 
 
 In the play of new intellectual forces which followed on the 
 fall of the Empire and the restoration of peace, the sentiment of 
 race, like others, took on a more considerate form. While 
 Sismondi, Guizot, and Augustin Thierry were deciphering and 
 constructing anew the history of the nation, Amedee I'hierry, the 
 brother of Augustin, was working specially at the problem of its 
 racial origins. His book, though still familiar, is superseded for 
 
 ' P. 266 si/. ' P. 242. 
 
 " The Origiues Gau/oises of La Tour d'Auvergne (third ami posthumous 
 edition, Hamburg, 1801) proceeds upon the Antiquitd de la nation gaiiloist\ 
 by D. Pezron, Paris, 1704, and the Histoirc des Celtes of Simon Pelloutier 
 (pastor of the French church in Berlin), Paris, 1771. 
 
 B 
 
1 8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 students by works of greater critical circumspection, resting on 
 the much fuller archaeological knowledge of later years ; but it is 
 of importance in culture -history for its statement, from a scholarly 
 French point of view, of the traditional conception of the " Gallic " 
 character, which the two Thierrys supposed to persist through 
 the ages. While undertaking to give " to the subdivisions of the 
 race their proper shades and their distinctive character," he 
 insisted that " the Gallic race shows itself constantly identical 
 with itself"; and he thus sets its character forth : — 
 
 " Let us open ancient history : let us follow in their brigand ages 
 two hordes, one of Gauls, one of Germans : the situation is the same : 
 on the two sides an equal ignorance, brutality, barbarism : but how 
 one feels nevertheless that nature has not cast these men in the same 
 mould I . . . 
 
 "The salient traits of the Gaulish family, those which most differen- 
 tiate it, in my opinion, from the other human families, may be thus 
 summarised : a personal bravery which is not equalled among the 
 ancient peoples ; a frank and impetuous spirit, open to all impressions, 
 eminently intelligent ; but along with that an extreme mobility, no 
 constancy, a marked repugnance to the ideas of discipline and order 
 prevailing among the Germanic races, great ostentation, in fine, a 
 perpetual disunion, the fruit of excessive vanity. If one should 
 summarily compare the Gaulish family with that Germanic family 
 which we have just named, one might say that the personal sentiment, 
 the individual mc^ is too much developed with the first, and that with 
 the other it is not enough. Thus we find on every page of tfie history 
 of the Gauls, original personages who keenly excite and concentrate 
 on themselves our sympathy, making us forget the masses ; while in 
 the history of the Germans it is usually from the masses that all the 
 impression comes." ^ 
 
 We have here little more than an uncritical repetition, by a 
 Frenchman, of the comments passed on the ancient Galli by 
 ancient writers, in particular Polybius, C^sar, and Tacitus, 
 from a Roman point of view ; the old charge of disunity being 
 endorsed presumably on the ground that modern France had 
 undergone civil wars and revolutions ; no inquiry being made 
 as to whether the Germanic races had not had very similar 
 fortunes. The value of the psychological distinction between 
 the Gaul and the German may be speedily estimated from the 
 fact that (jiesebrecht, a modern German historian of the 
 Teutophile school, has selected as the supreme Germanic 
 
 ^ Histoire dcs Gaulois, 1828, Tom. L, Introd., pp. iv.-v. 
 
THE QUESTION OF KACE. I9 
 
 characteristic exactly that which Thierry finds so peculiarly 
 Gallic — the untameable self-assertion of the ego^ " the stiff sub- 
 jectivity of the German nature {des deutschen Wesens) which 
 admits of no outward restraint, even the holiest, when it is 
 irritated or menaced."^ But, whatever the value of Thierry's 
 estimate, it was obviously well-fitted to pass current as the true 
 account of French character among the enemies of France, 
 especially among the Germans, whom it so generously certificated 
 with a gift for discipline and order. 
 
 And it did not stand alone in French literature. In the 
 turmoil of French politics, after the tyranny of the First Empire 
 and the collapse of the Restoration, with the Conservative re- 
 actionaries abusing the generation of the Revolution, and the 
 Liberals deploring the success of the reaction, there grew up 
 a French tendency to visit on the French character the faults 
 of both sides. The late M. Fustel de Coulanges, in a review 
 of the first volume of Zeller's Histoire d'AUemagne in 1872, 
 charges it in particular against the Liberal school of French 
 historians and publicists for a long time back, that they had 
 been wont to play into the hands of the enemy by wilfully 
 blackening their own race, and gratuitously extolling that which 
 had now become the enemy of enemies.- In their resentment 
 of the elements of anarchy and of tyranny, which had alternately 
 cursed their country for generations, the Liberal school, said M. 
 Fustel, had turned in bitterness against France itself, and heaped 
 upon the motherland aspersions which her rivals gleefully took 
 for verities, coming as they did from French mouths. Perhaps 
 M. Fustel exaggerated the amount of anti-Gallic criticism put out 
 by his countrymen. One does not see in the popular histories 
 of his Liberal predecessors any such cessation of normal 
 patriotism as he implies : on the contrary, jVIichelet and Martin 
 seem to have a sufficiency of pride in their country and their 
 race.^ On the other hand, M. Fustel clearly exaggerated the 
 
 ^ Cited by Zeller, Histoire (t AUcmagiic, Tom. II., Avant-propos, p. xvii, 
 "^ Cp. Buchez, Histoire de la Formation de la A^ationaliti' Fraiicaisc, 
 Introcl. 
 
 •* It is noteworthy that Dr Bodichon, who fifty years ago worked out a 
 theory of racial types, puts all the Celts into his b/ond category, marked by 
 the traits usually credited to the Teutons in particular, setting against that 
 a brown race, marked by most of the defects commonly imputed to the Celts, 
 but including such superior types as Hannibal, Cresar, Cicero, Michelangelo, 
 and Napoleon. Cuvier he puts, with Newton and Luther and Washington, 
 among the blonds. — [Etudes sur T A IgJrie, Alger, 1847.) 
 
20 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 amount of blatant patriotism in (iermany when he gave out 
 that there had been virtually nothing but self-glorification and 
 contempt of France in the modern treatment of French history 
 by Germans. There have always been, as we have said, sane 
 cosmopolitans in modern Germany as in other countries; and one 
 of the most emphatic assertions which Fustel and Zeller could cite 
 of the indebtedness of Germany to neighbouring civilisations was 
 made by Waitz in his History of the German constitution. It 
 was the German Holtzmann, again, who in his Kelten icnd Ger- 
 inanefi revived the seventeenth century theory that the Gauls of 
 history were actually Germans ; and before him the German Leo 
 had set forth a " Celtomaniac " thesis of which, according to 
 Buchez,^ he had to cut short the publication, by reason of the 
 patriotic resentment it aroused. But it remains true, I think, 
 that there has been more of impartial criticism of France by 
 French publicists than has been bestowed on their own country 
 by the publicists of any other ; while there has been more of 
 crude and puerile self-glorification done for Germany by German 
 historians during the past fifty years than can be matched in the 
 serious literature of any of the other leading European States in 
 that period. It almost outdoes the English self-praise of the 
 generation of Waterloo. And though Germany had clearly 
 profited enormously by French influence in the eighteenth 
 century, there had been little recent German acknowledgment 
 of that in comparison with the amount of French eulogy bestowed 
 on modern Germany for her services to culture. It was not only 
 that, as M. Fustel observed, French Liberals gave a rash credit 
 to the Germanic stock for all manner of primeval merit, and for 
 vaguely vast services to the cause of self-government from time 
 immemorial, but that they were disposed to see in German 
 science the proofs of unique intellectual gifts, also to be set down 
 to the credit of race. The language of Taine on this head, 
 dating from his early Liberal period, remains to show how far the 
 disinterested appreciation of young Frenchmen for things German 
 could carry them in the two decades before Sedan : — 
 
 "From 1780 to 1830, Germany has produced all the ideas of our 
 historic age ; and during half-a-century to come, during a century 
 perhaps, our main business will be to re-think them (dc les re- 
 pcnser). . . . 
 
 "At the end of the last century there arose the German philosophic 
 genius, which, having engendered a new metaphysic, a new theology. 
 
 ^ Ilistoire de la Formation dc la N'ationalifJ Francaise, Introd. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 2 1 
 
 a new poesy, a new literature, a new linguistic, a new erudition, 
 descends at this moment into the sciences and continues their evolu- 
 tion. No spirit more original, more universal, more fecund inconse- 
 quences of every bearing and of every kind, has shown itself for three 
 hundred years. . . . 
 
 " In the power of discovering general ideas ... no nation and no 
 age [has excelled] these Germans. That is their dominant faculty : 
 it is by this force that they have produced what they have done. 
 This gift is properly the gift of comprehending {begreifen). By it we 
 reach synthetic conceptions {conceptions if ensemble — begriffie): we 
 unite under a master-idea all the scattered parts of a subject ; we see 
 under the divisions of a group the common tie which unites them. . . . 
 It is the philosophic faculty par excellence; and in fine it is the 
 philosophic faculty which has stamped its seal on all their works. By 
 that means they have vivified dry studies which had only seemed 
 fit to give occupation to pedants. By that, they have divined the 
 involuntary and primitive logic which has created and organised 
 languages, the great ideas which are hidden in every work of art, the 
 deep poetic emotions and the vague metaphysical intuitions which 
 have engendered myths and religions. By it they have divined the 
 spirit of ages, of civilisations, and of races, and transformed into a 
 system of laws of history what was only a pile of facts. By it, they 
 have re-discovered or renewed the meaning of dogmas, re-united God 
 to the world, man to nature, mind to matter, and perceived the 
 successive concatenation and the original necessity of the forms of 
 which the universe is the synthesis. By it they have made a 
 linguistic, a criticism, an aesthetic, an exegesis, a history, a theology, 
 and a metaphysic so new that they long remained unintelligible and 
 could only be expressed by a special language. And this proclivity 
 has proved so imperious that it has submitted to its empire the arts 
 and poesy itself"^ 
 
 And so on. We need not here do more than notice how little 
 all this line of affirmation is reconcilable with other passages in the 
 same work, as this : — 
 
 " The more one studies the Latin races and literatures in contrast 
 with the Germanic, the more one becomes convinced that the peculiar 
 and distinctive gift of the former is the art of developing^ that is to 
 say, of arranging ideas in continuous lines ... by calculated trans- 
 itions, with a regular progress. Jonson has acquired in his study of 
 the ancients the habit of decomposing ideas, to unrol them piece by 
 piece and in their natural order." . . . - 
 
 ^ Histoire dc la litti'ratitre anglaise, v. 268-272. 
 ^ Id., ii. 106. 
 
22 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 A want of real co-ordination, a habit of random generalisation, 
 flaws all Taine's sociological work. But what we are here con- 
 cerned to note, as regards his eulogy of the Germans, is first its 
 generosity, and secondly its extravagance. He has heaped up 
 praise without a hint of detraction. And all the while it stood 
 on scientific record, that of the most important generalising ideas 
 of modern science, in the period mentioned, the majority had 
 come from his own race, from Laplace, Lavoisier, Lamarck, 
 Bichat, Cuvier, St Hilaire ; while on the other hand, the suc- 
 cessive theologies and metaphysical systems of Germany had been 
 nullifying and undermining each other, and the German litera- 
 ture, at the moment of writing, exhibited an almost complete 
 stoppage of inspiration. Taine, in truth, probably knew but 
 little in detail concerning the manifold product he had been so 
 confidently extoUing. In any case, we may with better grounded 
 confidence say to-day, that of the great mass of German theoretic 
 construction of which he speaks, laborious and earnest as it 
 undoubtedly was, an enormous amount has since been undone 
 by German and other hands, ^ having been found ill-based, pre- 
 mature, incoherent, unsubstantial ; and that while much good 
 fresh work is always being done by Germans in practical science 
 and practical research, German imaginative literature is now, and 
 has been for a generation, mostly unoriginal, uninfluential, un- 
 initiative. Germany, in fact, turns out to be like other countries, 
 an amalgam of strength and weakness, insight and shortsighted- 
 ness, achievement and failure.- 
 
 On the German side, however, apart from the searching and 
 disinterested self-criticism set up by the Socialist movement 
 (which again derived practically from English and French 
 stimuli) there has been a growing tendency to self-exaltation, 
 partly on the strength of such foreign praise as Taine's, partly on 
 the strength of militarist vanity. Before 1870, Prussian official 
 self-sufficiency had abundantly expressed itself^ in depreciation 
 
 ^ Compare the tone of Noire on the German thinking of the previous 
 generation, when, he says, the writings of Theodor Waitz were "little re- 
 garded and less esteemed" because "all minds were under the spell of the 
 Schelling-IIegelian phrase-mongering, and all healthy thought was stifled" 
 {Max Miilkr and the Philosophy of Language, 1879, p. 48). I do not cite 
 Noire as a critic of any great judgment, but simply as exhibiting the upset made. 
 
 ^ It is true that epoch-marking work in imaginative literature has in the 
 same period been produced by Scandinavians. But the same is true of 
 Russians, who as Slavs used to be Teutonically disparaged like the Celts. 
 
 •* Concerning the Gallophobia of the middle of the century, see Eberweck, 
 U Allemagne et les Alleviands, 1851, p. 601. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 2 3 
 
 of France, though the general temper of the people had not 
 yet taken on that tone.^ We are told, for instance, that even 
 when the French prisoners were arriving in hosts during the war, 
 there was manifested towards them a sentiment of self-diffident 
 respect by the German civilians.^ But M. Zeller, beginning his 
 special studies for his history ten years before the war, had 
 already been stung by the arrogance of German writers on the 
 respective origins and the contrasted history of the two peoples. 
 Moral worth and political capacity had been alike arrogated to 
 the "Teutonic," and denied to the "Celtic" stock by a series of 
 German specialists in the name of historical science ; and M. 
 Zeller, whose family was of German descent but entirely French 
 sentiment for some generations back,^ and who combined with 
 sufficient German erudition a due measure of French incisive- 
 ness, proceeded to let the stuffing out of the German legend with 
 much assiduity. It was impossible that any one work should put 
 an end to the uproar of foolish patriotism beyond the Rhine ; 
 but M. Zeller's work, though finally an unsatisfactory history, 
 lacking due gestation and tending unduly to loose polemic, 
 remains a useful corrective of the more flatulent forms of 
 Teutonic historiography, as well as of the anti-patriotic bias in 
 France. It is a grievous thing that history should ever have to 
 be written in such a spirit ; but the blame lies with the side 
 which first weighted the scales. When German historians 
 systematically represent their race as monopolising private and 
 public virtue, chastity and the political faculty, it becomes need- 
 ful that some non-German should emphatically tell the truth 
 about Merovingian vice and the long epochs of miserable 
 anarchy in German history. As M. Fustel sums up the first 
 volumes : — 
 
 " He (Zeller) shows that Germany, as a civilised nation, is the product 
 of Rome and of Gaul. He makes always clear a characteristic fact : 
 it is that progress, intellectual, social, and moral, has never taken place 
 in the Germanic race by an internal development, and was never the 
 fruit of an indigenous effort. It has arisen solely from without. From 
 without has come to the Germans Christianity, implanted by the 
 
 * Holtzmann in 1855 speaks of the then "so-called Frenchman-eaters, die 
 Sogenannten Franzosenfresser" {Kelten und Germatieii, Vorrede, S. xiii.). 
 
 - See the article of Mr A. Eubule Evans, on " Germany under the Empire " 
 in the Contemporary Review, February 1896, p. 167. 
 
 3 Yet he was denounced as a "renegade" in the German press on the 
 appearance of the first volumes of his history. 
 
24 THE SAXON AND THE CELT, 
 
 puissant sword of Charlemagne ; from without came those who taught 
 them to build cities ; from without came laws which were something 
 else than vague customs, a justice which was something else than 
 private war and luergeld^ a liberty which was something more than 
 turbulence. Germany has received from without chivalry ; from with- 
 out civic liberty ; from without the idea of empire ; from without letters 
 and sciences ; from without universities, copies of the ancient Parisian 
 school ; from without Gothic art, an imitation of the French cathedrals ; 
 from without religious tolerance, taught by France to the Catholics, 
 and by Holland to the Protestants. A German has made the avowal 
 that ' the German race has never, of its own qualities and without 
 an exterior impulsion, made a single step towards civilisation.' ^ M. 
 Zeller notes in fact that from Caesar and Tacitus to Charlemagne, 
 that is to say, during eight centuries, Germany has given the spectacle, 
 so rare in civilisation, of a country absolutely stationary, always bar- 
 barous, always hostile to the civilisation which flourished near it. To 
 civilise there was needed force : the warriors of Charlemagne had to 
 march twenty times from the banks of the Rhine, of the Seine, of the 
 Loire, to protect in Gemiany the missionaries and the builders of cities. 
 Germany did not make progress ; she received it, she underwent it." - 
 
 And yet it is to be noted, to the credit of French scholarship, 
 that there was prompt deprecation on the French side, even in 
 1872, of the spirit in which Zeller wrote. He was actually 
 
 ^ M. Fustel has somewhat altered the quotation as given by Zeller. It is 
 from Waitz, Deutsche Verfassitngsgeschichte, iii. : — "The German race would 
 never of its own qualities and without an exterior impulsion and a rupture of 
 its own traditions, have arrived at a superior development." 
 
 - Fustel de Coulanges, IJ Histoire en France et en Aileiiiagne (1872), 
 reprinted in Questions Historujues, 1893, pp. 14-15. M. Fustel would doubt- 
 less have admitted, on challenge, that what he here says of the derivative 
 character of German civilisation is at bottom equally true of all the northern 
 civilisations, including the ancient Gallic and the historic French. It may be 
 as well, however, to take due note of the fact here. The verdict of rational 
 sociology must be that all modern European civilisation derives from the seeds 
 of the ancient, and that the difference between Germany and France is mainly 
 one of time, or order of development ; and as regards Germany the point has 
 to be specially pressed only because of the vogue of the hallucination as to 
 the self-civilising power of the Teutonic race. It is inconceivable that either 
 France or Germany, peopled by any primitive race whatever, could to-day 
 have reached anything like a high state of civilisation, either material or 
 intellectual, had it not been for contact with the previous civilisations of the 
 south. And in the south, too, the civilisation of Greece was clearly secondary 
 to that of Egypt and Phoenicia, and the civilisation of Rome to that of Greece. 
 (The theory of the case is set forth in the " Synthetic Summary " of the author's 
 work ox\Buckle and hisCn'ths, and in the Free Review, November, 1894, p. 173.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 25 
 
 blamed by many of his own countrymen, somewhat unfairly, for 
 letting any trace of national animosity appear in his work ; and 
 he had to defend himself in a second preface wherein he dwelt 
 anew on the German provocation, of which, sooth to say, some 
 of his critics were unaware, reading as they did only in their ow^n 
 language. M. Fustel de Coulanges, whose agreement with 
 Zeller's general estimate we have seen, put the verdict of historic 
 science weightily enough : — 
 
 " It is not our recent disasters that have taught M. Zeller to know 
 Germany. The book which he has just published was written ten 
 years ago. The preface alone is new ; and it is not that which we 
 praise here : we even venture to say that it makes a blemish, that 
 it lowers a work of pure science. It savours of enmity, and we would 
 not have a historian an enemy. It is made for war ; and we do not 
 hold in France that a history should be a work of war. Even in the 
 body of the work, too often a note of bitterness is heard. The author 
 seems to have an antipathy and even a rancour towards his subject. 
 He tells only the truth ; but he does not hide the fact that he is pleased 
 when the truth is unfavourable to Germany. The matter is that of 
 exact and sure erudition : the form is too often that of recrimination 
 and ill-will. . . . Assuredly it were preferable that history should 
 always have a more pacific mien ; that it should remain a pure and 
 absolutely disinterested science. We would fain see it poised in the 
 serene regions where there are neither passions nor rancours nor 
 desires for vengeance. We demand of it that charm of perfect im- 
 partiality which is the chastity of history." 
 
 But historiography has not yet reached that stage, because 
 historians in Germany even more than elsewhere, are apt to 
 be mere instruments of the ruling ideal of the hour,^ and so we 
 cannot well have history written on a high plane for a society 
 living in the main on the low plane of imperialism and military 
 pride. Few eminent heads in Germany seemed to have resisted 
 the intoxication of 1870. Mommsen and Strauss, both already 
 tainted with racial malice, alike figured as mouthpieces of the 
 insolence of victory, as if prouder to shout for once with the 
 mob than to think in the study at the time when, of all times, 
 the mob could be left to shout for itself. Let it be written of 
 them that, claiming to be scientific historians, they had not 
 
 ^ Unfortunately the tendency is not confined to the province of historio- 
 graphy. It affects ethics, economics, and philosophy. Compare Levy- 
 Bruhl, V Alleinagne depiiis Leibniz, pp. 391-394, as to the fashion in which 
 Hegel reshaped his political philosophy to suit his environment at Berlin. 
 
26 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 enough of science or of sanity to rise at a critical moment above 
 the most commonplace of passions ; or, feeling it, had not the 
 civilisedness to refrain from crudest expression of it. Momm- 
 sen's utterances remain to testify how much of scientific good 
 faith underlies his partisan treatment of ancient history. At the 
 outset of the war, he declaimed on the peace-loving disposition 
 of his country, on its guiltlessness of aggression — the old formula 
 from the region which had of old sent out more aggressors than 
 any other in Europe ; which had given almost the last great 
 European illustration of absolutely wanton and unprovoked 
 aggression, in the case of Frederick ; and whose rulers, we 
 now know, had zealously planned the very war in hand. But 
 no sooner were the German arms seen to be carrying all before 
 them than Mommsen, at the ofificial hint, produced a historic 
 demonstration that Alsace and Lorraine, in virtue of race heredity, 
 rightly " belonged " to Germany. It was not a straightforward 
 affirmation of the law of vce vktis, of the title of the victor of 
 the spoils ; it was a mock-moral pretence of uniting a formerly 
 German population to the new German empire on ethico- 
 historical grounds. Carlyle thought fit to illustrate the depth 
 of his ethics by taking up the same parable in England. No 
 more transparent sophistry, however, was ever published by a 
 scholar. On the principle laid down by Mommsen, as Fustel 
 reminded him, Germany was entitled to annex by force a large 
 part of Switzerland, and even Holland ; France was entitled to 
 annex much of Belgium and Switzerland ; Austria was equally 
 entitled to reannex parts of Germany ; and England was entitled 
 to try to reconquer the United States. 
 
 Historians who can reason in that fashion will not stick at 
 trifles ; and Mommsen has contributed to the world's stock of 
 vain phrases his opinion that the " Celtic race " is " politically 
 useless." Of the moral and scientific worth of that opinion in 
 turn we shall speak later, only noting here that it passes current 
 with multitudes of those Germans and English who think that 
 all things said in the name of science are scientific, and that 
 archaeological learning is a security for wisdom. So there goes 
 on a sham scientific war of words between the writing sections 
 of the two States, in addition to the chronic exchanges of insol- 
 ence between the journals, Germany doing most of the output 
 in the former department,^ whatever France may do in the latter. 
 
 i'*The Frenchman has certainly a complacent belief in his own pre- 
 eminence. And as certainly it lies latent at the back of British thought. 
 But nowhere is it so aggressively displayed as in Germany. It is there a 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 2/ 
 
 It is difficult to overstate the nugatoriness of the great mass of 
 the discussion, especially on the German side. To a certain 
 extent it has a moral footing, as an expression of the old feeling 
 that the greater sexual licence of France is a source of racial 
 decadence. But the German assumption of virtue in this matter, 
 always in large part hypocritical, is every day further from the 
 fact; and German talk of the "decadence of the Latin races,'' 
 which consistently alternates with equally judicious talk con- 
 cerning the " Celtic " races, must strike most thoughtful and 
 retrospective people in Germany as very idle indeed. A century 
 ago, the German nation, in nearly all its fragments, seemed to 
 the full as decrepit and decadent, politically speaking, as any 
 State in Europe can seem to any observer to-day. If it has since 
 attained to strength and relative soundness, so, surely, may any 
 other people. And when we regard its apparent progress towards 
 the political condition of Russia, the extraordinary abasement of 
 public opinion before the personality of the emperor, the rapid 
 gravitation of all the forces of freedom and progress to the side 
 of Socialism, with the prospect of a death-struggle between that 
 ideal and its opposite — when we consider all this, we shall see 
 small reason to share the average Teutonic complacency over the 
 condition of all things Teutonic. 
 
 As for the Teutophile tone towards France, it sometimes seems 
 to amount to nothing more than a sub-rational animosity of blond 
 people towards dark — a form of folly which, happily, one never 
 meets with as between the blond and the dark of any one com- 
 munity, but which seems to germinate in the peculiarly primeval 
 atmosphere of race sentiment. I have sometimes thought, in 
 listening to German and other talk on the subject, that when a 
 Teuton happens to be blond he feels entitled to be specially 
 arrogant on the topic of nationality.^ And yet not only does one 
 
 positive cult. It is encouraged by the authorities ; it is fostered in the 
 schools; perhaps some day it will form a subject for examination." (Art. 
 " Germany under the Empire," by A. E. Evans, in Contemporary Review, 
 February, 1896, p. 169.) 
 
 ^ The criterion of complexion is thus put forward in an ill-made but then- 
 esteemed work of the last generation on ethnography : — " If the imperial 
 government were simply to chop off the head of every demagogue who was 
 not a blond 7<:'//?Vt'-man, they might 'get along' in France as tranquilly as 
 in England, Germany, and the United States. Z>(2;-^'-skinned races, history 
 attests, are fit only for military governments. It is the unique rule genial 
 to their physical nature ; they are unhappy without it, even now, at Paris. 
 None but the fair-skinned types of mankind have been able to realise, in 
 peaceful practice, the old Germanic system described t)y Tacitus — ' De 
 
28 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 see the majority of Germans to be dark, but one finds that 
 distinguished Germans who are put forward as types of German 
 capacity and German achievement are physiologically the very 
 types given by the theory to the " Wiilsch," the non-German 
 races. Ranke, for instance, used to be often cited as the typical 
 German historian, familiar with all historic fields, untiring in 
 industry, a minute researcher in original documents, but passing 
 freely from one province to another. Well, Ranke was a little 
 dark man with bright black eyes, answering somewhat closely to 
 that type of Ligurian or Aquitanian which is at times specified as 
 the fundamental element in the so-called Celtic peoples — a type 
 as far as possible from that of the traditional Teuton. And I 
 have heard a brown Frenchman, an expert in history, but entirely 
 free of the prejudice of race, impartially characterise much of 
 Ranke's work as that of an imbecile^ — the epithet being one 
 which the critic would as readily bestow on members of his own 
 race as on those of any other. 
 
 When we come to battles over complexion, it would seem 
 as if the discussion had already ended in triviality. On the 
 contrary, however, it affects to begin there. And he who would 
 know how much or how little of scientific basis there is for the 
 
 minoribus rebus principes consultant; de majoribus, onines' . . ." (Nott 
 and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, Philadelphia, 1854, pp. 404-405). It is 
 interesting to follow the logic of this proposition : — i. The French are a 
 dark-skinned race : therefore they are unhappy without military rule. 2. 
 But, being dark, they are always upsetting such rule. 3. In their insurrec- 
 tions they have leaders of their own complexion, who, like the rest, find 
 military rule genial to their physical nature, but, being dark, nevertheless 
 resist such rule. 4. All that is needed to make the dark race accept the 
 rule under which they are happy is to chop off all the dark heads. 5. The 
 remaining blonds, not finding military rule genial to their physical nature, 
 will quietly accept it. 6. There would still, in the terms of the case, be 
 blond rebel demagogues ; but these would not matter, as they would not be 
 <lark. It was within a few years of the publication of these absurdities that 
 the ' tranquil ' United States, of which Messrs Nott and Gliddon were natives, 
 had their Civil War, set up by the action of presumably the oldest Anglo- 
 .Saxon stock in North America. The political state of Germany, under 
 Bismarck and later, will finally serve to illustrate the force of the law that 
 it is only the non-Germanic races which need and accept military rule. 
 According to Messrs Nott and Gliddon, their view of French possibilities 
 was universally shared. They state that (/5. ) "the world shakes with 
 laughter at Frenchmen for attempting a reiniblic." 
 
 ^ Compare, however, the genial and cordial t'loge of Ranke at his deatli, 
 by Zeller, who, in criticising Ranke's occasional lapses into race prejudice, 
 exhibits an exemplary urbanity and good humour. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 29 
 
 presuppositions and prejudices of race with which we have been 
 dealing, must give some heed to a discussion which largely turns 
 on matters of complexion. I shall try to put the gist of the 
 dispute before him as briefly as possible. 
 
 § 4. The Problem of Race Origins. 
 
 The question of race origins is in the nature of the case one 
 of the last biological problems to be brought under scientific 
 treatment. Like all others affecting men's relations to the uni- 
 verse and to each other, it is first handled by the methods 
 of myth-mongering ignorance, whose conclusions later become 
 traditional truth for minds which w^ould conceivably be capable 
 of sounder ideas, but for the traditional misguidance ; and even 
 when the spirit of science begins definitely to scrutinise and 
 modify tradition, it is long hampered by the old bias. Thus we 
 still show in our current speech the traces of the ancient oriental 
 guess which divided the varieties of mankind into three — the 
 children of Shem, of Ham, and of Japhet. Ham and Japhet 
 have receded somewhat from common view, but " Semitic " or 
 " Shemitic " is still the name for the speakers of a certain group of 
 languages ; and we all know with how much of inconsistent 
 prejudice and malevolent passion the adjective has become 
 associated in modern continental politics. But matters are not 
 much better, at times, in the region of professedly strict ethno- 
 logical discussion ; where, after a nominal acceptance of all the 
 historical implications of the doctrine of evolution, the question 
 is often treated in total disregard of those implications, nay, in 
 disregard of the bearing of notorious and undisputed historic facts. 
 
 All historians are now agreed, for instance, that language is 
 not at all a sure clue to the history or pedigree of any race or 
 part of a nation. In recorded history there are many cases of 
 large populations adopting a language which was not originally 
 that of their stock, and completely giving up the language of 
 their forefathers. It is indeed questionable whether this has 
 not been true at some epoch of the majority of the peoples of 
 Europe, When, therefore, we speak of the ancient Gauls and the 
 ancient Germans, as we trace them in the earlier periods of their 
 written history, it is obviously an arbitrary proceeding on our 
 part to assume that either the one or the other represented a 
 nation of only one general type, physical or mental, descended 
 for ages solely from similar types, speaking the same language. 
 That is simply the assumption of historic ignorance, guided 
 
30 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 originally by the Biblical habit of supposing all nations to have 
 arisen by direct descent from some one man, or by the coalition 
 of groups descended from one man. It is difficult to express 
 the essential absurdity of that idea of the growth of nations ; but 
 it is at the root of a great deal of modern opinion as to the 
 pedigree and qualities of stocks or races.^ It is true that we 
 have no positive and demonstrated knowledge of the manner of 
 the rise of races to set against the fables of primeval theology ; 
 but all the elements of real knowledge we possess are found to 
 lead us to the general conception (i) of an inexpressibly slow 
 iind gradual evolution of a low human species from a still lower 
 one of anthropoid apes, the evolution perhaps taking place over a 
 very wide range of territory, and including from the first a number 
 of variations ; further, (2) of the killing out, during many ages, of 
 <in indefinite number of varieties, many of them perhaps less 
 brutal than those which survived, in the struggle for existence ; 
 further, (3) of a gradual distribution of masses of primitive 
 humanity in different quarters of the planet, with the result of 
 the setting-up, in many more ages, of some marked general 
 differences of colour, speech, and aspect in separated races ; and, 
 still further, (4) of the development in a relatively much shorter 
 space of time, of more or less marked differences of speech, and 
 minor differences of aspect, among populations whose language, 
 on analysis, is found to give very plain traces of descent from one 
 original stock — that is, a stock apparently formed in the third of 
 the processes here sketched. Now, from the point of view of all 
 inquirers alike, the differences of speech between so-called Celts 
 and so-called Teutons, if not the alleged generic differences of 
 character between them, have arisen only in the fourth process. 
 All the main languages of Western Europe are admitted to be 
 kindred ; they are grouped as " Aryan " ; and till a few years ago, 
 still following the Biblical lead, we were taught that the primeval 
 Aryans, so-called from the application of the name to the pre- 
 sumptive Sanskrit speakers in early Sanskrit literature, had origin- 
 ated somewhere in Central Asia, and were thence gradually 
 ■distributed by waves of emigration, some into India and Persia, 
 but the majority into Europe. The Asian hypothesis, which can 
 
 ^ Thus we have Professor Max Miiller laying it down in his Lectures on the 
 Science of Language that there was a time "when the first ancestors of the 
 Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and the 
 ■Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay, under the satne 
 rcof.^' (Cited by Dr Isaac Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, pp. 3-4. Compare 
 ihe passage cited by Dr Taylor from Canon Cook.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 3 1 
 
 be traced back to the legend of the Garden of Eden, is now- 
 abandoned by a majority of the younger specialists in anthro- 
 pology ; the prevailing opinion being that the main European 
 races " originated " in Europe. In nearly every branch of 
 archaeological research, in metallurgy, in botany, and in zoology, 
 as well as in mythology and philology, support had been found 
 for the Asiatic assumption ; so ready are men to see proofs for 
 what they believe in advance ; but in every department, in turn, 
 these evidences have been to some extent discredited or disproved 
 by later research.^ The Sanskrit language is found to be a late 
 instead of an early system, showing phenomena of vowel de- 
 generation like modern Greek ; and the " Aryans " of the Vedas, 
 instead of representing a primeval civilisation and creed, from 
 which all the main European forms are descended, are pronounced 
 to be themselves an offshoot from a presumptive European stock. 
 The earliest European civilisation, on close scrutiny, has every 
 appearance of being indigenous ; and the skull-types of all 
 periods, found by excavation in all parts of the continent, seem 
 to be clearly akin to the skull-types of the present day. Yet 
 even in the light of these discoveries, certain assumptions, based 
 solely on the older ways of thought, are still adhered to ; and 
 some inquirers, in the very act of upsetting old conventions, are 
 found adhering to others no better founded. 
 
 The very nomenclature of ethnology - is a record of the 
 abandonment of one false position after another, without any 
 definite change of method. In the first movement away from 
 the merely Biblical position — in the light of the discovered kin- 
 ship of the European languages with the Sanskrit, which seemed 
 to square so far with the Biblical account of human origins — it 
 was decided that the speakers of all these languages belonged to 
 
 ^ See The Origin of the Aryans, by Isaac Taylor, and the very able and 
 erudite treatise of M. Reinach, Le Mirage Oriental, Paris, 1893 ; Masson. 
 .(Reprinted from the review Anthropologie, Nos. 5 and 6, 1S93. ) M. Reinach 
 frankly avows that he had formerly accepted the view of Oriental origins 
 ■which he now decisively rejects. I would take leave to suggest, however, that 
 M. Reinach himself rests heavily on very slender evidence when, from the 
 premisses (i) that Cassiteros, the Greek name for tin, is in all likelihood Celtic 
 in origin, and (2) that the word is found in Homer, he infers that there was a 
 Phoenician commerce with the British Isles (later identified w-ith the Cassiterides 
 because of their tin) in the tenth century B.C. Surely the passage in Homer 
 may easily have been one of the later interpolations. 
 
 ''In the English sense of -the term = the science of race divisions. In 
 France, the term is applied somewhat as we apply "anthropology," which 
 again in France covers much of what we include in ethnology. 
 
32 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 one " race " or " species " or " variety," which was first called 
 " Caucasian," then " Indo-Germanic," then " Indo-European," as 
 the suppositions of boundary one after another broke down under 
 criticism. In connection with all of these names, there was 
 recognised by the more scientific thinkers the persistence of a 
 certain fallacy — the fallacy that the given group of languages 
 stood for a specific race. " There are Indo-European languages," 
 said Oppert ; "but no Indo-European race." And now that 
 " Aryan " has by common consent been substituted for these, 
 the same caveat is more necessary than ever. It is often made,^ 
 but oftener disregarded. The necessary preliminary to any solid 
 theory of race origins, a careful biological schema of the rise 
 of the human race, is left undeveloped, the leap from Darwin's 
 scanty and confused suggestions to Haeckel's brilliant hypothetic 
 schema- being too rapid for either scientific conviction or 
 popular acceptance ; and it seems to be ordinarily taken for 
 granted that the formation of any one race begins with the 
 formation of its language, though it clearly follows on the Dar- 
 winian doctrine that there was an immense period of quasi- 
 human life, during w^hich language was in "infancy." Thus, 
 between the primary assumption that divergence of race begins 
 only at divergence of language,^ and the secondary assumption 
 that language-forms mark off varieties of race, ordinary ethno- 
 logical reasoning is comprehensively fallacious. 
 
 Apart from fallacies turning on language, again, there is a 
 constant begging-of-the-question in regard to the significance of 
 certain peculiarities of aspect. It is habitually assumed that the 
 characteristics of blond people and dark people, long-headed 
 people and broad -headed people, are matters of heredity de- 
 riving from certain primordial, purely blond and dark, long- 
 headed and broad-headed races. In no part of the world to-day 
 
 1 See S. Reinach, V Origine des Aryens, 1892, p. 2. "I consider the 
 Aryans as an invention of the study and not as a primitive people." (R. 
 Hartmann, Die Negritier, S. 185). "The typical Aryan, as the theory 
 postulates him, has not yet been discovered" (Virchow, cited by Reinach). 
 
 2 The Pedigree of Man, Eng. tr., pp. 75-78. See Haeckel's schema criticised 
 in De Quatrefages' Huinan Species, Eng. tr., ch. xi. 
 
 •■ This assumption is of course not always made ; and one investigator has 
 expressly pointed out that "race-evolution" must precede the evolution of 
 speech : — " Die verschiedenen Menschenracen reden Sprachen, die unter sich 
 absolut keinen urspriinglichen Zusammenhang haben : daraus fojgt aber 
 unwiderleglich, dass die Racenbildung der Sprachbildung voranging" (Th. 
 Poesche, Die Arier, S. 104). 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 33 
 
 do we find such definitely marked-off races ; yet it is taken for 
 granted that there were at one time such races. And, while the 
 premiss almost implies that the primitive longs and broads, 
 blonds and darks, derived from pithecoid men so characterised,^ 
 the pressure of facts forces some of the theorists to decide that 
 there were longs and broads, blonds and darks, among those 
 primeval "Aryans" who are assumed to stand out from the 
 other races of men speaking non-Aryan languages. 
 
 Yet this already mongrel family is constantly represented, 
 without any attempt to relate the proposition to the main 
 evolution theory, as " originating " in this or that small part 
 of the planet. The remote abstraction of the race has been 
 cherished by a filial posterity with a singular devotion. A 
 cursory survey of the literature of the subject reveals that it has 
 been provided with at least a dozen " cradles." The " cradle " of 
 the race has been located - in 
 
 Bokhara, by Rhode. 
 
 Siberia, „ Pietrement. 
 
 India, „ Curzon. 
 
 Bactriana, ,, Pictet, Max Miiller, Kuhn, von 
 
 Roth, Szc. 
 Plateau of Pamir, ,, Orby, Lenormant, Amelineau, 
 
 Bourdais, Szc. 
 Armenia, ,, F. Miiller, Peschel, Brunnhofer. 
 
 Germany, ,, Geiger and Loeher. 
 
 South-East Russia, ,, Benfey, Tomaschek, Schrader, 
 
 Huxley. 
 West Russia, ,, Poesche. 
 
 Gaul, „ Lenglet-Mortier and Vandamme. 
 
 Lower Danube Region, ,, Madame Clemence Royer. 
 Region between the Atlant^? and the Oural, by Cuno. 
 Scandinavia, by Penka, Sayce, de Lapouge, 
 
 Lombard. 
 Western Europe, ,, Koeppen. 
 
 There is said to be evidence for every one of these locations, the 
 broader and the narrower alike, evidences partly derived from 
 correspondences of language in relation to natural objects, and 
 
 ^ This point has been raised by Haeckel. Cp. Topinard, Aitthropologie, 
 Eng. tr., p. 531. 
 
 - See L'On'giiie Europt'enne des Aryens, by the Jesuit Father Van den 
 Gheyn, Paris, 1889, p. 5 sq. ; and Reinach, VOrigine des Aiycns, 1892, pp. 
 23, 35. 47. 49, 52, 68, 85, 92. 
 
 C 
 
34 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 partly from archaeological remains. Yet what is meant by the 
 " origination " of a race, not one of the later theorists seems to 
 have made clear. It may mean (i) "creation" in that spot of a 
 certain type, or (2) evolution in that district, through untold 
 ages, of a special human type from a pre-human, or (3) acquisi- 
 tion there of a primordial " Aryan " language, by an already 
 mongrel variety of mankind which before had no language, or 
 only a scanty store of "roots" in common with species which 
 elsewhere developed non-Aryan languages, or (4) development 
 there of either a blond or a dark type, either a long-headed or a 
 broad-headed type. Thus the very conception of an Aryan 
 cradle collapses on the first analysis, leaving us asking, in 
 consistency, for further " cradles," first, for mankind in the lump, 
 next, for the non-Aryan races, for the blonds, for the dark, for 
 the broad-heads, for the long-heads, for the tall, for the short, 
 and so on ad infinitum. 
 
 Narrowing our attention to the two points of complexion and 
 skull-shape, we go through the same process of pre-supposition, 
 scepticism, and collapse. So far as I am aware, there has been 
 no properly inductive and decisive inquiry as to how varieties of 
 complexion,^ height,^ and skull shape arise, whether through 
 mere interbreeding of primordial variants, or through the normal 
 operation of traceable causes which subsist now as formerly. 
 One of the most independent investigations ever made of the 
 race problem is that of Herr Theodor Poesche,^ who boldly 
 grapples with the phenomenon of blondness, tracing the facts 
 inductively and seeking for a biological clue. While making 
 some oversights, he shows pretty fully that the ordinary assump- 
 tions as to the blondness of certain nations are quite erroneous ; 
 that only in Sweden and Norway, and perhaps in Denmark, is 
 there a majority of blonds ; that, as there are many blonds 
 among the Eskimos and the Lapps, so there are many dark 
 people in Sweden and Norway, and apparently still more m 
 some of the Danish islands ; that even in the " blondest " 
 parts of Germany the dark are in the majority ; that the dark 
 
 ^ Cp. De Quatrefages, Human Species, Eng. tr., pp. 265-6, 276, &c. 
 
 - It would seem that height is at least as important a characteristic as com- 
 plexion and skull-shape. Yet it is admitted by Broca that " in all races, even 
 in those which are pure, and a fortiori in those which are mixed, the height 
 presents sufficiently wide individual variations." {Mimoires Anthropologiques, 
 
 i. 387.) 
 
 ■* Die Arier : ein Beitrag zur historischcn Anthropologic, Jena, 1878. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 35 
 
 people multiply as we go to the south and west ;^ that the same 
 thing occurs in France ; and that blond people are found among 
 non - European races in every part of the world, some Asiatic 
 peoples, commonly supposed to be sallow and dark-haired, being 
 in reality predominantly blond. Thus the traveller Vamb^ry 
 notes concerning the Turcomans, usually conceived to be the 
 reverse of fair : " As regards colour, the blond prevails : and 
 there are even whole tribes, as, for example, the Kelte race, 
 among the Goergen Yomuts, which are generally half-blond."- 
 This consists with much older written testimony ; the ancient 
 Chinese annals mentioning no fewer than five blond peoples in 
 Asia ; ^ while according to Galen and Hippocrates,* many of the 
 Scythians were blond. Then there are blond tribes at the 
 present day in Setchuan, in China; there are many red-haired 
 and blue-eyed types among the Afghans ; there are blonds in 
 Morocco and in nearly every Berber tribe — in fact, they are 
 found in every population in the world,^ even among negroes 
 there being variations in the blond direction. On this phenomenon 
 of blondness, thus seen to be so widespread, Herr Poesche 
 scientifically enough generalises that blond hair, blue eyes, and 
 white skin are alike to be set down to the physical cause of 
 
 ^ Poesche cites the discourse of Virchow before the Anthropological Con- 
 ference at Jena, in which, yrow school-statistics, the following percentages of 
 blond to dark throughout Germany are arrived at : — 
 
 Schleswig-Holstein, 43'35 per cent. 
 Pomerania, 42 "64 ,, 
 
 Hanover, 41 'oo ,, 
 
 Prussian-Rhineland, 29'64 ,, 
 Bavaria, 20*36 ,, 
 
 As these figures are taken from a scrutiny of children, they may be held to 
 represent the maximum proportion that can be allowed to the blonds, since 
 it is notorious that many blond children grow dark-haired in later life. See 
 also Karl Penka, Die Herkiinft der Arier, 1886, S. 97-103, for a series of 
 German testimonies to the dwindling of the blond type outside of Scandinavia. 
 - Sketches of Central Asia, p. 296. 
 
 ^ Klaproth, Peiiples de Race Blonde, in Tableau historique d' Asie, pp. 161- 
 186. Cf. Abel Remusat, Recherches sur les langnes tartares, avant-propos, 
 p. 44. 
 
 •* Hippocrates, De Aere et Locis, x. 90 (c. 48 ed. van der Linden); (/. 
 Poesche, Die Arier, S. 26, citing Uckert. 
 
 '' "Die Blonden finden sich vom Eismeer bis zur Sahara, und vom atlan- 
 tischen Ocean bis zum Baikalsee und Indus ; die Stidkiiste der Ostsee ist das 
 Centrum ihrer Verbreitung : dort sitzen die meisten und blondesten ; sie 
 nehmen nach alien Richtungen ah, je nach der Entfernung von dieser Kiiste 
 des baltischen Meeres." Poesche, as cited, S. 32. 
 
36 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 defect of pigmentation ; and, following a suggestion of Prichard,^ 
 he connects this phenomenon with the more extreme one known 
 as albinoism.- Yet, while thus recognising that albinoism and 
 blondness alike may occur everywhere, and while further recog- 
 nising that albinoism occurs sporadically among the lower 
 animals, Herr Poesche takes it for granted that all the historic 
 phases of blondness derive by heredity from one stock, which 
 became wholly albino by reason of living in certain physical 
 conditions conducive to non-pigmentation. These conditions 
 he finds in a special degree in Russia, in the region between 
 the Dnieper and the Niemen, where there is a great area of 
 marshy land, and where alike among men, animals, and vegetation 
 there is the most decided approach to general albinoism. There 
 seems to be in the climate there something hostile to the process 
 of pigmentation of hair, eyes, and skin ; and it thus happens 
 that albinoism, which in other parts of the earth occurs excep- 
 tionally, occurs here generally. Here, accordingly, must have 
 been developed the race of blonds.^ 
 
 Now, it follows from Herr Poesche's own induction that 
 albinoism, which, like blondness, crops up all over the globe, 
 might be developed in many districts in varying degrees, relatively 
 to the stress of the climatic influence. It is suggested by the 
 same induction that the influence in question broadly diminishes 
 westward and southward from the northerly region, where it 
 appears to be strongest. It also suggests that in the course of 
 ages even the reduction of certain territories to a cultivated state 
 may have so modified certain climatic conditions as to counteract 
 the influences making for blondness ; nay, that even change in 
 the food and way of life of individuals* may aff'ect their pigmen- 
 
 ^ It is to be noted that, before Prichard, Blunienbach specified the albino 
 as a variety of the human race occurring in all parts of the world. 
 
 ^ " Alle diesecharakteristischen Erscheinungen sind tiufei/ie Ursache zuriick- 
 fiihren, de/i Mangel an Pigt/ieni in den entsprechendcn Theilen. Die Blonden 
 sind Albinos Oder, genazier gesprochoi, Halbalhinos." S. 17. 
 
 ^ "Zwischen Niemen und Dniepr, an den obern ZuflUssen, in den unge- 
 heuren Rokitnoslimpfen zeigen alle organischen Gebilde, Menschen, Thiere, 
 und B'aume, die ausgesprochenste Neigung zum Albinismus ! Es ist also dort 
 etwas in Boden, Wasser, und Luft, das der Bildung des Pigments in Haaren, 
 Augen, und Haut feindlich ist ; was an alien Orten der Erde vereinzelt auftritt, 
 der Albinismus organischer Gebilde, ertritt hier massenweise auf und erklart 
 uns so das Entstehen der grossen, blonden, Menschenrace ! " (Poesche, S. 68.) 
 
 ** Since this was written I have found that both of these suggestions were 
 made long ago. In 1645, Conring, noting the difference between the con- 
 temporary German type and the ancient descriptions, suggested that not only 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 37 
 
 tation.^ But instead of allowing these obvious considerations to 
 have their fair weight in his theory, Herr Poesche takes it for 
 granted that all blondness derives from the initial albinoism of a 
 race which became albino in a certain European region, the 
 blonds being the product of a crossing of the primary albinos with 
 darker races. And for him this primary species of albino is the 
 Aryan race, though by implication he credits its virtues to those 
 with which it has inter-bred. These primary albinos and half- 
 albinos were all alike, "as we still find the wild peoples"- — an 
 entirely arbitrary assumption by the way, on a par with the 
 current delusions as to race-complexion which Herr Poesche 
 exposes, the apparent exceptional alikeness of the " wild " races 
 being only the illusion of a superficial observation, such as is apt 
 to arise for us at our first contact with almost any foreign 
 people.^ And this early albino or half-albino species was not 
 only all blond but all long-headed (dolichocephalic), because it 
 has been found that the great majority of (supposed) ancient 
 Swedish (presumably fair-haired) skulls are long-headed, while 
 the great majority of (supposed) ancient Lapp (presumably dark- 
 haired) skulls are broad - headed (brachycephalic). On these 
 grounds the German ethnologist, Ecker, in his Crania Gennaniae 
 meridionalis occidentalis, mokes the ancient Germans purely dolicho- 
 
 race-mixture but changed way of life may have been the cause ; and in 1778, 
 Zimmermann repeated a suggestion as to change in the German climate which 
 Conring had rejected. See Penka, Die Herktinft der Arier, S. 99. 
 
 ^ So Httle has been done in the way of analysis of the problem that the 
 notorious fact that thousands of persons, blond in childhood, become dark in 
 later life, has been left unnoticed by many of the ethnologists, and unexplained 
 by all. 
 
 ^ " In einer fernen Zeit lebte also irgendwo ein Volk, ganz hotiiogen in sich, 
 ivie wir hente noch die wildcii Volker ireffen, das folgende charakteristische 
 Merkmale besass ; es war hochgewachsen, dolichocephal mit niederer, schlecht 
 entwickelter Stirn, vorspringendem Hinterhaupt, dessen Rand ein Fiinfeck 
 bildet, blond, blauaugig, mit weisser Haut und lippigem Haarwuchs." S. 23. 
 
 •* Thus I remember to have read somewhere a confident assertion of the 
 uniformity of features in a Russian regiment as compared with an English one. 
 An average Russian would probably say the same of an English regiment. 
 Unobservant whites say the same thing of negroes in the mass ; and most 
 people are quite sure that all sheep, for instance, are alike. Vet the shepherd 
 can distinguish them about as well as the dairymaid can her cows. It is told 
 again, that an European artist, visiting a Japanese studio, politely confessed 
 that one of the things that struck Europeans in Japanese art was its general 
 sameness." "That, was the reply, "is exactly what we say of European 
 art." And Humboldt long ago remarked that while Europeans on first seeing 
 natives of South America found them all alike, they later found that they 
 differed from each other as much as Europeans. 
 
38 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 cephalic, because they are historically said to have been blond. 
 The Teuton, in fact, is the typical Aryan, the first dilution or 
 modification of the unmitigated marsh-bred albino, placed in a 
 healthier situation than the Aryanising marsh, and growing to much 
 greater strength and stature accordingly,^ while the Celt is a further 
 blond developed in the valley of the Danube, leaning more to 
 broad-headedness, because mixing more with non-Aryans.- 
 
 It is not easy to see what special comfort the modern Teuton 
 can derive from this view of things. In the first place, the type 
 presented is not at all admirable : the " low and badly-developed 
 forehead " with abundant hair suggesting anything but an intellec- 
 tual race.^ In the second place, the great majority of Germans 
 are not now dolichocephalic,* by Herr Poesche's express ad- 
 
 ' S. 197- 
 
 ^ " Das Thai der mittleren Donau ist unstreitig als die alte Heimath anzu- 
 sehen, in der aus Arien Kelten wurden." S. 168. " Die Kelten waren die 
 Avant-garde der grossen arischen Stidwestarmee. , . . Sie hatten als solche 
 besonders schwere arbeit, und ebenfalls grossere Beriihrung mit den anarischen 
 Urbewohnern Westeuropas als ihre Nachfolger." S. 169. 
 
 ■^ It is one of the most primitive prehistoric types. See De Quatrefages, 
 Human Species, p. 311. M. De Quatrefages, it is true, seeks to rebut dis- 
 paraging accounts of the ancient dolichocephalic skulls by citing Vogt's testi- 
 mony to the close similarity between the skull of a gifted contemporary savant 
 and that of the Neanderthal man : giving the further parallels of the skulls of 
 a Danish politician of the seventeenth century, a bishop of the fourth, and Robert 
 Bruce {Human Species, pp. 309-310). But such instances of real or presumptive 
 superior brain capacity in skulls of quasi-simian shape are quite inconclusive as 
 to the brain development of the prehistoric skulls. M. De Quatrefages makes 
 in this connection no comparative measurements, and says nothing of apparent 
 development of special convolutions. One detail in the description of the 
 ancient supposed-Teutonic skull does offer a foothold for speculation. It pro- 
 jects notably behind, a feature common to the majority of the skulls of 
 monkeys and negroes, and surmised in their case by Gall to be connected with 
 their special philoprogenitiveness. The ancient Teutons do seem to have been 
 very fecund and careful of their offspring. This gave them their main military 
 advantage — that of numbers. 
 
 ■* So far is the general aspect from corresponding with the theoretic that we 
 find Mr Meredith (Adventin-es of Harry Richmond, ch. 34) speaking of "the 
 German head, wide, so as seemingly to force out the ears." A short, blond, 
 and broad-headed French friend of the present writer, too, has often been told 
 in England that he "looks very like a German." Yet again, Mr Grant 
 Allen speaks of the early Anglo-Sa.xons as having "heads of the round or 
 brachycephalic type, common to most Aryan races." {Anglo-Saxon Britain, 
 p. 15, cf. 156). It seems safe to say with M. De Quatrefages and M. Reinach, 
 here alone at one (See Reinach, L'Origine des Aryens, p. 99), that broad and 
 long heads alike are •' Aryan." 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 39 
 
 mission/ so that the primary Aryan virtue would seem to be 
 sadly rarefied, while the bulk of it lies with the Swedes, who do 
 not exactly seem to possess the earth. The full half of man- 
 kind, too, are neither broad-headed nor long-headed, but medium- 
 headed (mesocephalic).- These facts might seem to suggest, like 
 the facts of albinoism and blondness, that the phenomenon in 
 hand, instead of being a matter of mere heredity, may be one of 
 proximate causation — that breadth or length of skull may be set 
 up, in some way as yet untraced, by certain special conditions of 
 life in the parent. If albinoism is admittedly thus set up, and if 
 albino or semi-albino types are found to be dolichocephalic, the 
 very coincidence would seem to suggest that the skull shape too 
 is partly determined by special conditions.^ There also obtrudes 
 itself on the student, in this connection, the known fact that 
 wilful deformation of the skulls of infants was till recently syste- 
 
 ^ "Messen wir aber die vSchiidel der heutigen Germanen, so finden wir dass 
 nur die Skandinaven noch in ihrer grossen Mehrzeit die alte dolichocephale 
 Form rein zeigen. In Siidwestdeutschland glaubt man nur einem Viertel der 
 gegenwiirtigen Bevolkerung noch dolichocephale Schiidel zuschreiben zu 
 diirfen." (S. 212). See also Penka, Die Herkniift der Arier, S. 132 ; and 
 Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 228. 
 
 - Poesche, as cited. The received mode of skull-appraisement, it should be 
 noted for the general reader, is to take the length of every skull as " 100," 
 and divide that by whatever fraction represents the proportion of the breadth 
 to the length. Thus a head of which the breadth is three-quarters of the 
 length will be rated as having an " index" of 75. As half of mankind are 
 found to range between 74 and 78, all within those figures are pronounced 
 mesocephalic, or medium-headed. Those below 74 are rated as dolichocephalic, 
 or long-headed ; those above 78 as brachycephalic, or broad-headed. 
 
 ^ Herr Penka, who is more circumspect in these matters, deals carefully 
 (i) with the theory of J. Ranke, that since broad-headedness reaches its 
 maximum in the Upper Tyrol and Switzerland, height of location may have a 
 transforming effect on skull shapes ("dass die Hohenlage einen transforrnirenden 
 Einfiuss auf die Gestaltung des Schadels ausiibe, und einen dolichocephalen 
 Sch'adel in einen brachycephalen umzuwandeln im Stande sei." Penka, 
 S. 138-9) , and (2) with the theory that broad-headedness may be a product 
 of civilisation ("dass der brachycephale Typus das Product der Civilisation 
 sei, also durch den Einfluss eines mehr geistigen Factors entstanden sei." 
 S. 141). Both of these theories, as he justly argues, break down, there being 
 many long-headed skulls in some mountainous countries ; while broad-headed 
 skulls are found in very remote times. But alternative theories readily suggest 
 themselves. It may be that some of the conditions of life in the Tyrol and 
 Switzerland are peculiar to these regions ; and it might be that the broad 
 skull survived because better adapted to civilisation. The question is not at 
 all closed. 
 
40 THE SAXON AND THli CELT. 
 
 matically practised in some savage tribes (the North American 
 Indian Flatheads being the best-known instance), and that the 
 practice subsists in an obscure way in civiUsed Europe,^ thus 
 strongly suggesting survival from barbarous times. It may be 
 then that in the skulls of some ancient grave-places either the 
 broader or the longer heads may have been artificially made so 
 in infancy. Indeed, in the tables of MM. Broca and Pruner Bey, 
 reproduced by M. De Quatrefages,^ allowance is made for such 
 deformations. But none of these considerations is weighed by 
 Herr Poesche. For him, dolichocephalism must be a matter of 
 special heredity from one ancient dolichocephalic stock — the 
 Aryan blond or albino, which is specially Teutonic. 
 
 And, slight as is the basis for this identification, and small as 
 is the satisfaction which seems to be rationally derivable from it 
 by anybody even if it be true, it is acquiesced-in and commented- 
 on by one French scientific writer in a way which once more 
 makes the anthropological student raise his eyebrows. It is 
 after a very learned examination of the dispute on Aryan origins 
 that M. de Ujfalvy writes : — ^ 
 
 " If human superiority consists exclusively in a certain physical 
 energy, in a stirring, enterprising, aggressive temperament ; in a 
 word, in a spirit of conquest, then certainly the dolichocephalic blonds 
 are the first race in the world ; but if, on the contrary, we examine 
 the psychic faculties, we see that the artistic conception, that supreme 
 genius of the human race, the eternal glory of the Greeks and of the 
 Romans guided by the Greeks, is become the imperishable patrimony 
 of the brown and brachycephalic races of central and southern Europe. 
 We have there a superiority which is otherwise enviable than that 
 claimed by the blond race, and one which may at need console the 
 brown brachycephali for having received from these rivals at a given 
 moment the {sic) Aryan language. Which last, by the way, I hasten 
 to add, is anything but proven." 
 
 And, on the last head, the reader, with still more haste, coin- 
 cides. For "the Aryan language," for one thing, does not exist. 
 But M. Ujfalvy's unconditional acquiescence in the German con- 
 ception of the primal dolichocephalic blond is fully as astonish- 
 ing as would be his acceptance of the theory that that particular 
 
 ^ Roget de Belloguet, Ethnogi'iiie Gaiiloise : 11*^ Partie, Types Gaiilois, 
 l86i, pp. 154-158. Topinard, Aiithropologie, Ptie. I. ch. 5, Eng. tr., pp. 
 176-185. 
 
 "^ Human Species, Eng. tr., pp. 372-373. 
 
 ^ Le Berceau des Aryas, par. Ch. E. dc Ujfalvy, Paris, 1884, pp. 30-31. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 4I 
 
 type had bestowed the existing European languages on Europe. 
 We have here a patriotic Frenchman (of whatever descent) 
 agreeing to regard the ancient Teutonic invaders of Gaul and 
 the Roman Empire as the most energetic race of the world, and 
 the typical conquering race in history. Both propositions are 
 far astray. The ancient blond Teuton or Gaul, though big and 
 robust, was notoriously a " soft " type to begin with. He had 
 no endurance, and could never hold out against equal numbers 
 of disciplined southerners.^ He made his conquests by force of 
 numbers, and by reason of selecting for his attack populations 
 which had passed out of the primeval hunting and militarist 
 stage while he remained in it,^ such as those of Gaul, Spain, 
 and Italy. When he in turn had passed out of the hunting and 
 militarist stage, he was easily enough conquered in turn by new- 
 military peoples. The Franks after Charlemagne made a poor 
 resistance to the Danes ; the Visigoths in Spain were easily over- 
 thrown by the Saracens ; the Saxons in England were subdued 
 by the Danes, and went down at one blow before the Normans. 
 As regards enterprise and the abstract spirit of conquest, the 
 Teutonic invaders of the west and south are not to be compared 
 to the Romans, or the Greeks under Alexander. The German 
 movements were the efflux of either hungry and overflowing or 
 of dispossessed populations of hunters, seeking to plunder rich 
 agricultural peoples. In modern times and in our own day, 
 the presumed descendants of these hunters are really not spe- 
 cially given to conquest ; and their " physical energy," so far as 
 they exist in Germany, seems to have been at a discount at the 
 recent Olympic games. The actual blond dolichocephali, as 
 Herr Poesche has told us, are the Swedes and Norwegians, who 
 have done little in the military way for some centuries, and a 
 good deal of whose energy at present appears to be happily 
 applied in the direction of literature and the arts. In fine, 
 M. de Ujfalvy, taking the formula about the dolichocephalous 
 blonds as a German vaunt, has given but a weak and erroneous 
 answer, when he might have annihilated the formula altogether. 
 He has given away his case. 
 
 All the while, as we have seen, the Teutonists admit that only 
 a minority of the Germans of to-day are dolichocephalous ; so 
 
 ^ See the ancient testimonies cited by Roget de Belloguet, Ethnog^nie 
 Gauloise, Partie II. : Types Gaulois, 1861, pp. 64-67. In particular, see 
 Livy, V. 44; vii. 12 ; x. 28. 
 
 - This historical phase is much and rightly insisted on in the Traits de 
 Legislation of Charles Comte. 
 
42 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 that on their own principles modern Germany has reached her 
 high developments of power and knowledge in virtue of her 
 mainly brachycephalic population, which in terms of the theory 
 is non-Teutonic. On the other hand, the population of France, 
 by the testimony of M. Broca, is no less mixed.^ In nearly 
 every district we find a miscellany of tall and short, brachy- 
 cephalic and dolichocephalic, Celtic, Germanic, and Kymric 
 according to the conventional types, but much more often 
 mixtures of these types in single individuals. Thus neither is 
 France brachycephalic nor (Germany dolichocephalic ; and still 
 the war of speculation and of insinuation goes on. 
 
 As for the comparative qualities of the alleged broad-headed 
 and long-headed races in pre-historic antiquity, we find that the 
 latter, identified by Teutonic writers with the Teutons, were 
 relatively much the lower in apparent civilisation at a given time. 
 
 ^ "Abstraction faite d'un tres-petit nombre de localites tres-restreintes, on 
 chercherait en vain dans le reste de la France una grande collection d'individus 
 presentant les caracteres d'une race pure. Partout il y a des hommes grands et 
 des hommes petits ; partout il y a des blonds et des bruns, des tetes longues et 
 des tetes rondes, des yeux noirs, bleus on gris, des visages celtiques, kymriques, 
 germaniques et meme pelasgiques. On trouve ces diverses varietes de tailie 
 de forme ou de couleur dans la plupart des families, souvent meme parmi les 
 enfants du meme pere et de la meme mere ; on observe tres frequemment 
 reunis en une seule personne des caracteres appartenant manifestement a deux 
 ou plusieurs races : le nombre des individus qui representent parfaitement le 
 type des Celtes ou le type des Kymris est extremement restreint : et enfin, 
 chose tres-remarquable, ces individus qui paraissent de race pure sont souvent 
 issus de parents qu'il serait impossible de rattacher a une race determinee. 
 La population de la France presente done I'instabilite ethnologique qui est 
 I'indice assure du melange des races." (Broca, Memoires cTAnthropologie, Vol. 
 L, 1871, pp. 330-33«-) 
 
 It must be observed, however, that Broca has not always spoken to the 
 same effect. The above passage, which occurs in his paper Stir Pethnologie 
 de la France, dates from 1859. In a paper on V Anthropologte de la France, 
 read in 1866, he affirms the existence of two fairly well-marked types — one 
 tall, blond, and narrow-headed, the " Kymry," the other shorter, darker, 
 broader-headed, the "Armorican Celts" — in Brittany alone : — "L'anthropologie 
 retrouve, dans la partie de la Bretagne qui a conserve la langue des anciens 
 gaulois, deux races juxtaposees, partout plus ou moins modifiees par leurs 
 melanges reciproques, mais bien reconnaissables encore dans les districts on 
 chacune d'elles predomine : I'une grande, blonde, dolichocephale, aux yeux 
 clairs, au visage allonge — c'est la race des Bretons, la race kymrique ; I'autre, 
 de petite tailie avec des cheveux plus bruns, des yeux plus fonces, une tete 
 moins dolichocephale, un visage plus arrondi — c'est la race des Gaulois 
 armoricains, la race celtique " (Vol. cited, p. 419). 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 43 
 
 "We find that the dolichocephalic people of the Baltic coast 
 were in the lowest grade of savagery, while the brachycephalic 
 races of Central Europe had made no inconsiderable progress 
 in civilisation, and had reached the nomadic pastoral stage. 
 Coming down to a much later period, we find that at the close 
 of the neolithic age the Teutonic race was the more backward, 
 since their culture-words are largely loan-words from the con- 
 tiguous Slavo-Lettic and Celtic languages. This is the case even 
 with words referring to agricultural and pastoral life."^ With 
 such facts as these to proceed upon, some French anthropologists 
 naturally take pleasure in the thesis that the real " Aryans," 
 the speakers of the Aryan languages, were the more civilised, 
 broadish-headed, darkish, southerly races, whom the narrow- 
 headed blond barbarians of the Scandinavian regions temporarily 
 overran — that it was short Gauls who " Aryanised " tall Teutons, 
 and not vice versa.- Some of the Gallic champions even seek to 
 make out that the dark Galli were the conquerors, not the con- 
 quered ; while Germans, with equal zeal, maintain that the 
 Teutons were not only the conquerors, but as superior in 
 character as in stature. And all this in the name of anthropo- 
 logical science. 
 
 It is clear that, if the question of persistent racial gifts and 
 defects is worth discussing at all, it must be discussed on more 
 concrete grounds than those we have just examined. It has, 
 indeed, been discussed on more concrete grounds — on all the 
 grounds supplied by ancient historical documents. To these, 
 then, we must go in our search for a defensible opinion. 
 
 § 5. The N^a/nhig of Celts, Gauls, Germans, and Teutons. 
 
 The name Celt, so often loosely and uncritically applied in 
 literature to a whole series of national groups, sometimes including 
 even the inhabitants of Spain and Italy, sometimes limited to the 
 Gaelic-speaking peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, is found 
 to be in origin, so far as written history shows, a local name for 
 only a regional group or set of tribes in the south of Central 
 Europe and the south of France, before our era. They may 
 or may not have been inhabitants of a particular district of the 
 modern Narbonne, in what became the Roman Province Nar- 
 bo7inensis, and later the province of Languedoc. The tribes of 
 that district were presumably among those of the inhabitants of 
 
 ^ Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 233. Cf. p. 239. 
 - Id. , pp. 226-229. 
 
44 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 ancient Gaul with whom the Greek trading colony of Massilia, 
 the ancient Marseilles, had first dealings. For reasons to be 
 shown later, it is somewhat unlikely that any tribe called them- 
 selves Keltai ; but tribes close to Marseilles may have so described 
 tribes further off. Whatever were its origin, the Massilians seem 
 to have taken the name, as traders will, as a convenient label for 
 the whole populations north of their colony, turning the local 
 word into the Greek Ke/toi, and calling all the northern bar- 
 barians Celts, somewhat as, then and later, the names " India " 
 and " Indian " were applied to eastern populations in general — a 
 usage of which we have still traces in the names " West Indies " 
 and " North American Indian." It is not known at what period 
 the so-called Celts settled in Southern France. Herodotus (b.c. 
 445), in a confused passage,^ locates Celts in the Danube valley 
 and " beyond the pillars of Hercules " (which may mean in 
 Spain), but not near Massilia. That, however, does not prove 
 that they were not there in his time. In any case, as regards the 
 naming of the people of Gaul, the usage of the Massilian traders 
 came to be the usage of Greek literature before the era of 
 Alexander. But it is to these tribes of the Danube valley and 
 Southern France that the latest investigation comes back as the 
 first clear and certain datum in the discussion on the distribution 
 of the " Celtic race." - 
 
 From this point onwards, perplexities abound. The Romans 
 gave the name of Ga/li to certain tribes of Northern Italy who 
 were believed to be of the same stock, or to speak the same 
 language, as the population north-west of the Alps, who w-ere 
 also called GalH, and whose land, like the Gaul-inhabited part of 
 Italy, was called Gallia. The Romans were in closer and more 
 general contact with the people in question than were the Greeks : 
 how, then, came they to call them Galli, and not Kelti ? We can 
 make no sure inference, positive or negative, knowing as we do 
 that the people who for the Romans were Graii or Graed, 
 Greeks, and whose country was Graecia, called themselves 
 
 1 B. ii. 33 : cp. V. 9. 
 
 - Compare Strabo, B. iv. c. i ; Diodorus Siculus, v. 32 ; Bertrand, ArcJid- 
 ologie celtique et gatiloise. 2^ edit., 1889, pp. 253-264; D'Arbois de Jubain- 
 ville, Les Celtes et les Imtgues celtiqties, 1882, p. 7. It is generally agreed 
 that Strabo wrote loosely on the location of the Celtae, as he cites Ccesar 
 erroneously, M. D'Arbois de Jubainville {liitrodiution a fiHiide de la litti!ra- 
 tiire ccltiqnc, 1S83, p. 90, note) decides that he was wrong in placing the 
 Celtae in the Narbonnaise, and that he had misread Polybius, who locates the 
 Volcae there. We are thus in uncertainty at the very outset. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 45 
 
 Hellenes, and their country Hellas. The presumption in that 
 case is that, as was believed in Aristotle's day, a certain Hellenic 
 tribe or set of tribes in earlier times called themselves Graikoi; 
 and this name was applied by the Romans in perpetuity, after 
 it had entirely passed out of use among the Hellenes.^ But 
 in the case of the Galli and Kelti that hypothesis is hardly open 
 to us. The Roman name Galli seems to have been as old as 
 the Greek name Keltoi. Were the Kelti then only a section 
 or branch of the Galli ? There is some ancient evidence that 
 the Greeks before our era recognised Kelti in parts of North 
 Italy, where the Romans noted Galli." But only about the time 
 of Caesar does the name Celtae come into sight with the Romans. 
 Help is sought from the languages which to-day we call Celtic. 
 (The name, it need hardly be observed, was pronounced with 
 the hard and not the sibilant sound of c : the proper sound is 
 Kelt ; and the French and English usage of pronouncing the 
 word Sell is only one of a hundred corruptions following on the 
 confusion of the Greek and Roman f.) It is plausibly argued 
 that Kelti or Celtae was a " Celtic " word closely connected with 
 that preserved in the Scotch-Gaelic word Caledo?i, whence comes 
 Caledonia. According to the Scotch-Gaelic dictionaries, the word 
 Ceiltach {c hard) means dtveller i?i the forest,^ and Caledon a forest 
 country. The Celts then may have been so named by them- 
 selves, or more probably by their immediate neighbours, as 
 forest -dwellers ; and Galli close to Massilia may have inad- 
 vertently given the Greeks the idea that all the other tribes 
 were Kelti. As a matter of fact the Scotch tribes whose territory 
 was formerly called Caledon have immemorially called themselves 
 Gael,'* (more correctly Gaedhil or Goidel), with a pronunciation 
 nearer the Latin Galli than is suggested by the English spelling, 
 Gael^ and with a semi-guttural sound of the g which is neither 
 that of our g nor our k, but something between g and the Greek 
 y^. It thus appears possible that the Kelti of the Greeks were 
 Gael or Gallach who were also Ceiltach, Galli who were forest- 
 dwellers. But on the other hand the word Gall or Gaill is the 
 Gaelic word for a stranger or foreigner ; and in early Irish history 
 
 ^ Compare the Saracen usage of calling all Westerns Franks. 
 
 * Bertrand, as cited. 
 
 •■ Or a sequestered people. The verb irf?'/ means "to conceal," while coille 
 is the modern word for a forest. In Scotch Gs-qWc forest -dwet/er would be 
 Coil/tic/t. 
 
 * Or perhaps sometimes by the adjective Gaelach. Compare the name 
 Gregarack = the tribe of Gregors or MacGregors. 
 
46 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 we have " The wars of the Gaedhill with the Gaill"^ so that 
 " Galli " may just have been a local name for tribes of another 
 race or of another dialect, and may have stood for no one race 
 whatever, even as " Welsh " was a (ierman name for foreigners 
 in general. There is no certainty possible here. 
 
 And now a new difficulty arises. After a time the Greeks are 
 found to have applied the term Galatai where they formerly 
 applied the term Keltoi — an apparent combination of the names 
 Keltoi and Galli. It is argued that they got Galatai from 
 Galatia, their later name for Gallia or Gaul. Gaeltackd, it is 
 noted, is a general Gaelic name for the Scotch Highlands. 
 Making that into Galatia, the Greeks would get Galatai as the 
 name of the Galli or Gallic people, reversing the process by which 
 the Romans made up Gallia, their name for the land, from Galli, 
 their name for the people.^ However that may have been, it came 
 about that Greek writers applied not only to the people of Gallia 
 in general, but to other northern Europeans, the name Galatai, 
 and this became the source of extreme confusion, the word 
 serving to cover alike those whom the Romans called Galli, 
 Gauls, and those whom they called Germani, Germans. The 
 Greek-writing historian Dion Cassius, in his compilation made 
 during the first half of the second century of our era, systematically 
 translates the Latin word Germani by the Greek Keltoi, while he 
 renders the Latin word Galli by Galatai, the relatively new Greek 
 synonym of Keltoi. In the Greek-writing Dionysius Halicar- 
 nassus again (shortly B.C.), Celtica, the " Celtic " region, extends 
 from the Atlantic to Scythia and Thrace, Gaul being the part west 
 of the Rhine, and Germania the part east.^ The Greek-writing 
 historian Diodorus Siculus, too (about 50 B.C.), gives the Greek 
 name Galatai to the Germans of the right bank of the Rhine, 
 attacked by Caesar in the year 55 B.C., while limiting the name 
 Celt to the people near Marseilles. Thus, wherever we have to 
 depend on the later Greek writers for our knowledge of the 
 Keltae or Galatae, it is either difficult or impossible to know 
 whether we are dealing with people kindred in blood or language 
 to the old Gallic-speaking populations of Brittany, Cornwall, 
 Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, or people kindred in blood or 
 
 1 " Danes and Normans, in the eyes of natives [Irish] were alike styled 
 Gain, or foreigners " (Richey, Short History of the Irish People, p. 125). 
 
 2 Amedee Thierry, Histoire des Ganlois, V. i. ch. i. 
 
 ^ D'Arbois de Jubainville, Les Celtes et les langties celtiques, 1882, p. 8. 
 (Keprinled in Introduction a I'dtude de la littdrature celtique, 1883.) Cp. 
 Bertrand, as cited, p. 260. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 47 
 
 language to some of the races called Teutonic. The presump- 
 tion often lies in the latter direction. The Greek-writing historian 
 Polybius (about 150 B.C.), who had access to good Roman and 
 other materials, appears to some to distinguish between Keltoi 
 and Galatai, applying the latter name always to certain bands 
 of mercenary and other warriors figuring elsewhere than in Gaul 
 and Northern Italy, and seemingly deriving from the region 
 between the Upper Danube and Thrace. The captors of Rome 
 about 390 B.C., called by the Romans Gallic are by him called 
 Galatai. Yet in some places he seems to connect, though not 
 to identify, the Galatae and the Keltae, as if they were united 
 against the Romans. It has thence been inferred that the Celtae 
 may have had the aid of the Galatai as mercenary troops in this 
 particular invasion.^ 
 
 When, then, anti-Irish or anti-Gallic writers, such as Bishop ^ 
 Lightfoot and Mr Goldwin Smith,- take for granted that the / 
 ancient Galatians were of the same " stock " as the ancient 
 Gauls in general and the modern Irish in general, and were 
 further alien to the so-called " Teutonic " stock, they are merely ( 
 manipulating verbal knowledge. On the very face of the case, 
 it is historically quite uncertain what was the pedigree of those 
 Galatae who invaded Greece and wrought such havoc in the 
 third century B.C., before settling down in Galatia. Their leaders' 
 titles were Gallic, and they were unquestionably the people whom 
 the Romans called GaUi, only a small band of presumable 
 Teutons (Teutobolds = ? Bold Teutons) being associated with 
 them. But no one now can tell whether they were of the "race" 
 of Bismarck or of the " race " of O'Connell, or of both ; and if the 
 ancient Galatians, Jewish or Gentile, were "foolish," as Paul 
 called them, it may as well have been with the folly of Germans 
 as with that of Frenchmen and Irishmen, to say nothing of the 
 heritages of folly which Paul seems to have discovered quite as 
 abundantly in the Grseco-Roman-Jews of Corinth, the Greek- 
 (ialatian-Jews of Galatia, and the hypothetically pure Jews of his 
 own land. For the drift of a great deal of later discussion on 
 the subject is to make out that the ancient Galli and Galatae 
 alike were of a type closely akin to the ancient German. 
 
 When, passing from the question of names, we look into the 
 elements of the population of Ancient Gaul, we find it already 
 consisting, about two thousand years ago, and presumably long 
 
 ^ Bertrand, as cited, p. 419. I cannot find that Polybius makes the general 
 distinction claimed by M. Bertrand. 
 
 - See the critique on Mr Goldwin Smith's Polemic hereinafter. 
 
48 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 before that, of a variety of apparently different stocks. Modern 
 research claims to establish that, despite this variety, the languages 
 spoken by the different stocks were dialects of one tongue,^ not 
 distinct tongues like the Gallic and Norse or French and Nor- 
 wegian ; and that this one tongue was clearly kindred with the 
 modern Gaelic, Welsh, and Erse. As against that claim, it is 
 worth while to go back to the familiar paragraph with which 
 Caesar (if indeed the passage be his) begins his Commentaries. 
 
 " All Gaul {Gallia) is divided into three parts, of which one is in- 
 habited by the Belgae, another by the Aquitani, and the third by 
 those who in their own tongue are called Celtae, in ours Galli. These 
 all differ among themselves in language, institutions, atnl laws. The 
 Galli are divided from the Aquitani by the river Garonne, and from 
 the Belgae by the Marne and the Seine. The Belgje are the bravest 
 of all these peoples, because they are far removed from the culture 
 and civilisation [ii cultu atque ]iu7na7titate\ of the (Roman) Province, 
 and the merchants rarely reach them with those things which lead to 
 effeminacy of spirit. Next to them are the Germani, who inhabit the 
 other side of the Rhine, and with whom they are continually at war ; 
 from which cause also the Helvetii excel the other Gauls in courage, 
 because they fight battles with the Germani nearly every day, either 
 driving them back from their frontiers, or themselves carrying war 
 into the territory of the enemy." 
 
 It may be noted in passing (i) that Ceesar did not include in 
 " all Gaul " the people of the district of Narbonne, which was 
 already a Roman province; and (2) that he probably got from 
 Greek writers the notion that the Galli as a whole called them- 
 selves Celtae. He does not seem to have learned any Gallic 
 tongue. If it be true that the later Greeks made the name 
 Galatia from the general native name for Gallia, it can hardly be 
 true that the mass of the Galli called themselves Celtae. As for 
 the conqueror's assertion that the Aquitani, Galli, and Belgae 
 spoke different languages, it is open to the explanation that they 
 spoke different dialects, which to him would seem different 
 languages ; and this is the gloss made by those scholars who 
 are satisfied that Belgae and Galli alike spoke Celtic or Gallic. 
 Even if we make this assumption, however, we only arrive at the 
 conception of a diversified population speaking variants of one 
 language. The differences of customs and of aspect which we 
 know to have existed are the more important in view of the 
 
 1 See the Ethnoginie Gauloise of Roget Baron de Belloguet, Pariie /. : 
 Clossaire Gaulois, 1858. 2° edit., 1872. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 49 
 
 presumed general unity of speech. The bulk of the people of 
 the district of Aquitania, and the neighbouring tribes called the 
 Liguri, were by the general consent of the ancient writers much 
 nearer in appearance to the people of Spain than to the more 
 northerly Gauls ; and were without dispute classed as Celto- 
 Iberian, that is, connected alike with the Iberians, the people of 
 the Peninsula, and with the people of Gaul. And the conclusion 
 pointed to by the historical evidence is that Celtae so-called, in 
 the era before written history begins, had successfully invaded 
 Spain as other Gauls successfully invaded Italy, mixing more 
 or less with the populations they found there ; while on the other 
 hand, either there remained in Gaul a dark stock which had 
 been there previously, or some Iberian peoples had invaded 
 Gaul ; with the result that on both sides of the Pyrenees, as on 
 both sides of the Alps, there were recently-mixed stocks. 
 
 But this datum only raises further question. The Aquitani 
 and the Liguri appear to have been dark-haired, shortish, dark- 
 skinned, " wiry," as the phrase goes, and nervously alert.^ The 
 more northern Gauls, sometimes called the " Gauls proper," are 
 on the other hand described by Caesar as tall, and by later 
 writers as tall, white-skinned, and fair or red-haired. Then had 
 there been an original " Celtic " stock which possessed these 
 characteristics in common with other northern peoples ; and had 
 it lost them during centuries of occupation of Southern France, 
 northern Spain, and northern Italy ? That is the first hypothesis 
 that suggests itself. But then we find that the modern Celtic- 
 speaking Breton race, presumably descended from the ancient 
 Armoricans of the same district, who were classed as Galli, are 
 much more often short and brown-haired or dark than tall and fair ; 
 and that the same characteristics prevail among the stocks of 
 Wales and Cornwall, who are classed with the ancient Bretons as 
 Kymri, a section of the Galli. Then the north-westerly Kymri 
 were more like the south-westerly Celto-Iberians than the rest of 
 the Gauls ; while the latter, curiously enough, broadly resembled 
 the Germans, as described by Tacitus. It is one of the per- 
 plexities of prejudiced historians, eager to find the Celts at all 
 times a hopeless species, that Caesar and Tacitus, in their writings 
 on Gaul and Germany, seem to recognise no specific difference of 
 aspect between the peoples.- Hence a number of inquirers, 
 taking physical aspect to be the true clue to descent, have come 
 
 ^ Compare the old authorities cited by Amedee Thierry in his Bistoire dcs 
 Gaulois, Partie II. ch. i. 
 
 - See the critique on Hill Burton on the Scotch Cells, hereinafter. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 to the conclusion that througliout Claul and the " Celtic " regions 
 there were really two races ; and that the tall and fair race was 
 really Germanic — a view which logically revolutionises the whole 
 line of speculation on the characteristics of the races, though 
 those who take it do not generally seem to see as much. 
 
 The (iermanic theory, which we have seen ^ to be of old 
 standing, rests substantially on the ancient testimonies that the 
 " Galli " like the " Germani " were tall and fair or red-haired. 
 This testimony, as we have also seen, gives no account of a 
 double element in the population of any one part of Gaul ; but 
 the separate accounts of the dark-haired Aquitani and Liguri, 
 the testimony of Ctesar as to the almost enslaved condition of 
 the mass of the people of Gaul as compared with the aristocracy 
 and the Druids, and the recognised prevalence of dark hair and 
 short stature among the decendants of the people of north-west 
 Gaul, have led many to the conclusion that throughout Gaul 
 there was a mixture of two stocks. In this restricted form, 
 without the assertion that either of the stocks was specially 
 " Germanic," and without any process of argument necessarily 
 implying that thesis, it is concisely and dispassionately put by 
 one of our leading Celtic scholars : — 
 
 " One language was spoken by two races which gradually fused 
 into one people — a northern, fair-haired, blue-eyed race, of tall stature, 
 lymphatic temperament, and elongated heads ; and a southern race, 
 shorter in stature and dry and nervous in temperament, having brown 
 or black hair and eyes and round heads. The free or dominant class 
 of Gauls belonged to the former race, which was evidently an intrusive 
 one. The inhabitants of the British Islands [before Ccesar] seem to 
 have been composed of the same two races, and to have spoken the 
 same language as those of Gaul." - 
 
 It is as a corollary to this general view that other writers afifirm 
 the " Germanic " character of the blond and dominant race. 
 The earlier upholders of that view sought to show that the blond 
 Galli of antiquity spoke a German language, an undertaking 
 which, though not hopeless, has always substantially failed.'^ 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 15, 20. 
 ' ^ Professor Sullivan ; art. Celtic Literature in Encyclopedia Britanirica. 
 
 ■* It seems quite clear that the language spoken by the north-eastern Galli 
 in Caesar's time was not the language of the Germani. Ceesar (B. G. i. 46) 
 tells that Arivoistus, the Germanic King who had crossed the Rhine fourteen 
 years before, had learned Gallic by long residence in Gaul. On the general 
 question, compare Roget de Belloguet, Ethnogc'nie Gaiiloise ; Partie I., Glos- 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 51 
 
 Some of the later adherents of the view are apparently content 
 to suppose that the red-haired Galli were Teutons who abandoned 
 Teutonic speech and acquired that of the people among whom 
 they came. That hypothesis does not appear to be met by the 
 Baron de Belloguet, who, having shown to the satisfaction of 
 most Celtic scholars that one language was spoken all over Gaul 
 at the beginning of our era, and that this language was non- 
 Germanic, appears to hold that these facts prove the Galli to 
 have been non-Germanic — that is, not offshoots of any of the 
 Teutonic-speaking peoples, but simply akin to these. He holds 
 to the conception of a blond race like the Teutonic whose 
 original language was yet Gallic and non-Teutonic ; ^ though his 
 general doctrine commits him to the view that these were not 
 the original population of Gaul. The outcome of his polemic 
 seems to be the thesis that a blond northern race imposed Gallic 
 on a dark southern race whose tongue previously was neither 
 Gallic nor Germanic, though on the latter head his position is 
 not clear, as he decides that the conquerors, being in a minority, 
 were absorbed by the conquered, and that their stock has now 
 for the most part disappeared.- His conclusions as a whole 
 may be briefly stated thus : — 
 
 (i) That the Celts- or Gauls, Belgae included, belonged to one 
 blond lymphatic type, little fitted to bear southern heat. 
 
 (2) That they were dolichocephalic, or narrow-headed. 
 
 (3) That there was a brachy cephalic or broad-headed popula- 
 
 tion alongside. 
 
 (4) That these last were not truly Galli. 
 
 (5) That the Galli were very like the Germani, but certainly 
 
 not Germani. 
 
 saire Gatdois. Iloltzmann, who deals very ingeniously with all the difficulties 
 of his thesis that the Galli were Germanic and the Germani Kelts, seeks to 
 show that the passage in Cresar, of which the MSS. give variant readings, 
 is corrupt, and must be read otherwise, so as to permit of another than the 
 received purport (Keiicn und Gcrjnanen, S. 31-36). But then Holtzmann 
 also argues that Strabo was right in departing from Cresar's account of the 
 sections of Gaul. The documents have thus to be very freely handled in 
 order to make out the Germanic hypothesis. 
 
 ^ " Les langues indo-europeennes ay ant eu le mcme berceau, les races qui las 
 creerent sortait egalement d'une meme souche." Partie II. Types Gaiilois 
 ct Celto-bretons, 186 1, p. 92. 
 
 - *' Le type gaulois considere dans son ensemble, tel ([ue les anciens I'ont 
 decrit, est entierement perdu dans les trois quarts de la France." {.Ethnogi'uie 
 Gaitloise: Ptie. II., Types Gaulois, end.) 
 
52 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 (6) That the Galli, already degenerating in Cresar's time, were 
 
 always a minority ; that they were not the aborigines, but 
 conquerors ; and that their stock has been lost in that 
 of the conquered. 
 
 (7) That this conquered majority belonged to a dark or 
 
 brown race, which originally occupied Western Europe. 
 
 (8) That they were probably of the stock of the Liguri, found 
 
 in the south of Spain and of Italy, and were identical 
 
 with the Lloegriens and the Gaedhail or Gael of the 
 
 traditions of Brittany and Ireland, 
 (g) That the Liguri were probably of African origin, and of 
 
 the stock of the present Berber race.^ 
 There remains the cognate theory of M. Alexandre Bertrand, 
 who also finds two races in pre - Roman Gaul, but defines 
 them as Celtae and Galli, making the last-comers the Celtae, 
 whom he regards as bringing a higher civilisation than that of 
 the Galli = Galatae, who were formerly in possession. This 
 theory, which is difficult to follow, by reason of M. Bertrand's 
 way of using the race-names, proceeds mainly upon the archaeo- 
 logical evidences for the late advent of an iron-using race who 
 came from central and south-eastern Europe. The earlier Galli 
 of Northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul), he finds to be a much less 
 civilised race than the Galli whom Caesar identifies with the 
 Celtae; and he apparently infers an invasion between 150 and 
 100 B.C. "The portrait of the Galli of Polybius cannot apply 
 to the Celtae of Caesar." In his view, the Celtic invaders found 
 the Druids already installed, and made terms with them, they 
 themselves constituting the aristocratic minority with whom 
 Caesar had to deal.^ 
 
 Between these theories and the Germanic there seems little to 
 choose. None seems capable of proof; and either way the red- 
 haired race figure as conquerors. And as the original existence of 
 two unmixed neighbouring red-haired stocks with widely different 
 languages is a perplexity the more — though Professor Sullivan 
 thinks the divergence of language could take place very speedily '■^ 
 — ethnologists continue to hark back to the Germanic theory, 
 modifying it by the surmise that the tall Galli, originally 
 German-speaking, had adopted the language of the population 
 
 '^ Arch^ologic celtiqne el Gauloise, 2*^ edit. pp. 394-397. 
 
 ■' The Irish and the German tongues, he contends, "must have been nearly 
 identical a few centuries Ijefore the Christian era " (Introduction to O'Curry's 
 Lectures on the Ancient Irish, p. Ixxvi.). 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 53 
 
 of Gaul, just as did the Franks later, within the historic period. 
 In favour of that surmise may be noted the fact that a number 
 of the names of Gallic aristocrats or leaders given by Cffisar have 
 a Germanic appearance. We have Vercingetorix, Orgetorix, Durn- 
 norix, Ambiorix, and so on,^ — names which certainly suggest the 
 Teutonic formation we find in Heinrich, Dietrich, Friedrich, and 
 so on ; though they never seem actually to coincide with modern 
 Teutonic names. " Rix " is the way in which Csesar might be 
 expected to write the German sound "rich," his x standing for 
 the Greek guttural ;y, c^^i- But then on the other hand we find 
 that n'g/i is the immemorial Celtic word for kifig, whereas only in 
 remote antiquity does the word rei'h or ret'Aa seem to have had 
 that meaning in German ; and though the Galli whose names we 
 have cited were not regarded as kings in the modern sense, the 
 suffix may very well have been a title of honour so originating.- 
 We have names of the same sort among the chiefs of the Britons 
 in Kent — e.g. Cingetorix, Lugotorix ; and one of the arguments 
 for the view that the Cimbri who invaded Italy were akin to the 
 Galli is the fact that among the names of their chiefs were Cesorix 
 and Boiorix. When German writers argue that Cesorix is identical 
 with the Teutonic Ge/sen'c/i, = Genseric, they only bring us back 
 once more to the fact that, whatever their descent, the north- 
 eastern Galli of Ctesar's day apparently spoke a very different 
 tongue from that of the German Ariovistus ; and there remains 
 such a name as that of the Nervian (Belgo-Germanic) chief 
 Boduognat,^ which seems to trace clearly to the Gallic Buadhach 
 = victorious, as does the name Boadicea or Boudicca. So that 
 similarity of names is somewhat slender evidence (and I know 
 of none better,"^ unless it be the apparently close resemblance of 
 aspect between Gauls and Germans in the old descriptions) on 
 which to decide that Caesar's Gauls were Teuton conquerors 
 absorbed in a non-Teutonic stock. 
 
 In any case, that solution fails to dispose of the questions : 
 (i) Who were the original Gauls? (2) Were they Celts ? (3) 
 Did the name Galli belong originally to the tall and fair and 
 
 1 Among the Galatae in Greece, too, we have such names as Synorix and 
 Poredorax. Pkitarch, l')e Mu/ierinn Virt^itibus, cc. 20, 24. 
 
 - This seems to have been the historic fact. See Professor Rhys's excellent 
 little book, Celtic Britain, 2d ed., pp. 57-65. 
 
 ^ De Bello Gallico, ii. 23. 
 
 ■* Holtzmann's manipulation of Gallic names, such as vergobretiis, in order 
 to show that they are not Celtic but Teutonic {Kelten tmd Germaiien, S. 90- 
 119), is really much less satisfying than the old Celtic etymologies. 
 
54 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 dominant northerns or the short and dark and subjugated 
 southerns ? (4) Were the stocks of the Aquitani and the Liguri, 
 or stocks closely related to them, distributed all through Gaul, 
 constituting the plebeians? (5) Why were there no ruling blonds 
 over them in Aquitania and Liguria : and why were there none 
 later among the Bretons ? 
 
 We may decide that the blond invaders had failed to conquer 
 the original inhabitants in Aquitania and Armorica, where, being 
 pressed on the coast, they would make a harder stand ; but even 
 then we are only at the beginning of the problem. Assuming the 
 two-race theory to be at bottom true, we must adopt one of two 
 positions: Either those dominant blonds were Germans or Teutons, 
 kindred in speech and blood to the bulk of the then peoples of 
 (iermany (who may or may not equally have subjugated a darker 
 aboriginal population), and despite their dominance had accepted 
 the language now known as Celtic or Gaelic, but really belonging 
 to the dark races whom they subjugated (and who in that case, 
 like the Greeks and the Italians, were also " Aryans " by descent) ; 
 or the Celtic language was originally spoken by a northern race 
 physically resembling the blond Germanic type, who subdued 
 certain dark populations speaking non-Celtic languages, and suc- 
 ceeded in imposing the Celtic language on them. On the latter 
 view the northern Kymry — Bretons, Welsh, and early Irish — may 
 have been of the same stock as the Aquitani and Liguri, and may 
 have originally spoken a language closely akin to that of the early 
 inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula. But either way, be it 
 observed, the tall blond race are implicated in all those ancient 
 accounts of the Celtic temperament which are drawn upon by 
 modern Celtophobes. If the ruling Gauls were of Germanic 
 stock, the Gaulish characteristics of which we have heard most 
 are Germanic characteristics ; and the Galatae of Greece were 
 equally a Germanic stock. Those Gauls whom Csesar describes 
 as eagerly inquisitive but unstable and fickle were the Gauls whom 
 he describes as very tall compared with his troops, and whom 
 other Roman writers describe as fair- or red-haired. Caesar says 
 nothing of a dark-haired inferior race who had all the faults of 
 ( lallicity, leaving only Germanic virtues to red-haired superiors. 
 He seems indeed to have had no idea that the Germans were in 
 anyway preferable to the Gauls. He was, in fact, no such 
 laborious student of character as some of our Christian Bishops 
 and historians appear to suppose. He was in earlier life an 
 unscrupulous adventurer, capable of displaying towards enemies — 
 as in his treatment of the Tenchtheri and the Usipetes — all the 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 55 
 
 cool ferocity and duplicity of his mediaeval Italian namesake 
 Caesar Borgia ; and in his dealings with Gauls and Germans he 
 had no higher ethical or critical standard than his own interest. 
 Those were in his eyes faithless who, owing him no loyal faith, 
 broke faith with him just as he was ready at need to break faith 
 with them ; and those were in his eyes fickle who did not 
 devotedly and stedfastly subordinate all their national aspirations 
 to the cause of the conqueror. He was none the less a man of 
 extraordinary power and sagacity ; and he developed into a 
 military ruler of remarkable clemency and self-control. But it is 
 absurd to take his censures of the Gauls, who several times came 
 near destroying him, as definitions of the character of a whole race 
 or set of races ; and it is worse than absurd to take his account of 
 the character of a tall white-skinned race of Gauls as applying 
 to a short, dark-haired race of Gauls to whom he does not 
 refer. And if Caesar's Gauls were a Germanic race, the Gala- 
 tians were a Germanic race, and the Britons before the Saxon 
 conquest were Germanic as well as Keltic, blond as well as dark. 
 So that whatever bad qualities of " race " are found by prejudiced 
 historians in the character of ancient or modern " Celts " are to 
 be connected just as much with the Teutonic stock as with the 
 Gallic, commonly so-called. 
 
 But even this is not all. It is assumed for the purposes of 
 the anti-Celtic school that the typical Teuton is — or was — tall 
 and fair and blue-eyed. But Tacitus, who is the chief ancient 
 authority with the Germans, describes them not as fair but as 
 red-haired,^ with blue eyes ; and he gives almost exactly the same 
 description of the Caledonians of Scotland,- remarking that their 
 physique and red hair tell of a German origin. Hence it has 
 been argued that these Caledonians, identified with the Picti, 
 were not Celts but Teutons ; though most of the archaeological 
 evidence supports the conclusion of Mr Skene, that the Picti 
 
 ^ "Truces et coeruli oculi, rutilce comx, magna corpora et tantum ad impetum 
 valida ; laboris atque operum non eadem patientia. " {De fiioribits Gerviaiioruin, 
 c. 4). The Baron de Belloguet has also pointed out that Galen (Comm. in 
 Hippocr. De salubri diaeta, c. 6) says it was a common error to call the 
 Germans yellow-haired, ^avdoi ; whereas they were really irv^poi, red-haired. 
 C/>. Dr Bei]doe, /oiinia/ 0/ A /if /ifopo/o^ny, Oct. 1870, p. 124. 
 
 ^ " Namque rutilte Caledoniam habitantium comre, magni artus, germanicam 
 originem asseverunt" {I'ifa Agricohe, c. 11). Yet some writers decide, in 
 respect of the sexual usages of the ancient Britons in general, that the Picls 
 were non-Aryan. See, however, Poesche, Die Arier, S. I02, as to the many 
 traces of polygamy among the early Scandinavians. (Citing Grimm, Geschiihte 
 der deutschen S/irac/wii, i. 18, 188.) 
 
56 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 and the Gael were closely kindred peoples. However that may 
 be, it is the fact that in a large part of Germany to-day, as in 
 England and Scotland, there are more dark-haired than red- or 
 fair-haired people ; while the fair- and red-haired ones seem to be 
 at least as often short as tall, and the dark-haired ones about as 
 often tall as short. Then, if we are to proceed upon the clue 
 by which the Germanic and Celtic types have been differentiated 
 as respectively fair (or red) and dark, or tall and short, are we not 
 driven to assume that in modern Germany and Austria there is a 
 preponderance either of Celts or of some other dark non-German 
 types, the old German types being now completely in a minority ? 
 And are we not further led to infer, as some do, that the old 
 Germanic stock is dying out, because lacking in capacity for 
 civilisation ? German writers expressly admit its disappearance as 
 regards all the more southerly lands which it once overran^ ; and 
 Herr Karl Penka puts this as the " most salient and most sad " 
 proof of the fact that the blond race has only a small power of 
 resistance to climatic heat.- But since the blond race not only 
 dwindles down in the southern countries, but is largely out- 
 numbered even in Germany and England, it would appear that 
 there is more than heat in the matter, and that even where it 
 appears formerly to have long flourished, as in Central Germany, 
 it is lapsing into or being supplanted by the darker types ; as if 
 its ancient success were a mere temporary triumph of militarism 
 and numbers over brains and civilisation, which are now turning 
 the tables. 
 
 At this stage, though the champions of Teutonism will doubt- 
 less adopt new explanations,^ the candid inquirer will begin to 
 admit that the assumption of certain recognisable and persistent 
 differences of type and character between Teutonic-speaking and 
 Celtic-speaking nations has singularly little foundation in reason 
 or in historic fact. And the further the tests are pushed, the 
 more baseless the assumption appears. In the Highlands of 
 Scotland, where there has subsisted down to our own day, a 
 people known as Gaels or Galls, and presumptively kindred 
 
 ^"Die grossen Schaaren von Germanen, ganze Volksstamme, welche 
 ausgezogen sind, welche zum Theil Jahrhunderte hindurch in fremden 
 Liindern mit erfolg die Herrschaft bewahrt und die unterjochten Eingebornen 
 ihre Gewalt haben fiihlen lassen, sie sind endlich nicht bloss von der 
 polilischen Biihne, sie sind auch von der physischen Btihne verschwunden. 
 Es sieht aus, als wenn sie hingeschlachtet worden waren." Virchow, cited by 
 Penka, Die Ilcrkimft der Arier, 1886, S. 98. 
 
 - Penka, Die Herkunft der Arier, S. 132 ; cp. Poesche, Die Arier, S. 212. 
 
 ^ See those above suggested, p. 36. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 57 
 
 with the Welsh, Bretons, and Erse-speaking Irish, to whose 
 languages theirs is more or less closely akin, we find a preponder- 
 ance neither of short dark people nor of fair-haired and blue-eyed 
 people but of red-haired and brown-haired and tall dark-haired 
 people. Lowland-Scotch prejudice leans finally to the thesis 
 that everywhere in the Celtic world in historic times the ruling 
 caste was Teutonic ; ^ but even this adjustment will not meet the 
 facts of the case. Finally, it is acknowledged that there is an 
 apparent preponderance of Scandinavian (that is, Teutonic) stock 
 in the Hebrides, where the language has for many centuries been 
 Gaelic. But this admission is made, on the sociological side, 
 only after generations of Saxondom had included in the same 
 vituperation all grades and all tribes of the Celts in Scotland as 
 elsewhere ; and the discovery of the Scandinavian origin of many of 
 the inhabitants of the \Vestern Islands is an extremely awkward one 
 for Celtophobes who had found the whole explanation of the misery 
 of the Hebridean crofters in the supposed fact of their Celticity. 
 
 Repelled thus from Ultima Thule, whither he has followed the 
 track frdm Gaul, the seeker for the primordial Celt tries next the 
 trail of those Kymry who, as we have them in Brittany and 
 Cornwall and above all in Wales,'' do not seem to have ever 
 been describable as generically tall and fair, but do seem to fill 
 one part of the traditional programme in respect of having been 
 nationally unfortunate. Who then were the Kymry ?^ In 
 remote antiquity we verbally trace them eastwards to the Kim- 
 merii, mentioned by Herodotus * as inhabitants of " Scythia " and 
 of the Kimmerian Bosphorus. The general name of Scythae 
 covered a multitude of tribes whose way of life, as related by 
 Herodotus, in many ways corresponded with that ascribed to 
 both Galli and Germani in later times ; and we trace among the 
 Scythae in particular, by the name of Get(2, the presumable Goths 
 of later history.^ After the beginning of our era, the Kiinmerioi 
 are explicitly identified by Greek geographers and historians with 
 the Kimbroi or Cimbri^ and the Galatae, and are vaguely de- 
 scribed as dwelling in the east and in the north of Europe, 
 
 ' See below the critique of Hill Burton's History. 
 - Cymraig is the Welsh name for the Welsh people. 
 
 •■' For a thorough study, see the posthumous work of Roget, Baron de 
 I5elloguet, Les Cimmiriens, which completes his Ethnog^nie Gauloise. 
 
 ' IV. 12. 
 
 '' Apparently represented to-day, however, by descendants of strongly 
 "Celtic" type. See below, p. 65. 
 ^ Strabo, vii. c. ii. § 2. Plutarch, Marius, c. 1 1 ; Diod. Sic. v. 32. 
 
58 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 coming from the shores of an icy northern sea and from the 
 Cimbric Chersonese. About a century before our era they 
 tumultuously invaded Gaul, Spain, and Italy, and seem to have 
 been then vaguely regarded as thus eastern and northern 
 in origin.^ The question arises. What was their language, 
 their stock ? They were associated with the Teutones, a 
 supposed Germanic tribe, whose name has since been made 
 to cover the aggregate of the Germanic peoples. Were the 
 Cimbri then Germani ? At once the old difficulties present 
 themselves afresh. For the Romans before our era the Cimbri 
 seem to have been like the Galli. The Cimbri defeated and 
 driven back by Marius, though leagued with Teutones, are in 
 various ways identified by Roman writers with the Galli ; ^ and 
 similarly, the Galli or Galatae who invaded Greece in the third 
 century before our era are called Kimbri by Appian and by 
 Diodorus Siculus.^ As regards the ancestors of the Welsh in 
 north-western France, we do not find that they were known to 
 Caesar or any of the ancients by the name of Kymry, which is 
 •the name by which the Welsh call themselves in their literature. 
 Still, knowing how often races are known by one name to their 
 neighbours and by another name to themselves, it seems natural 
 to suppose that the Gael-Kymry were connected with the Cimbri 
 whom the Romans lumped with the Galli. When however we 
 come to Tacitus, the chief source for our knowledge of the early 
 Germans, we find him treating the remaining Cimbri as a Ger- 
 matiic tribe, living north of the Elbe, where they are located also 
 by the geographers Strabo and Pomponius Mela.'* And Tacitus 
 further describes them as " now a small community, but great in 
 fame." ^ 
 
 We turn next to those Iberian and Italic stocks which we 
 have seen to be in some way connected with Gallia or " the 
 Celts " before our era ; and we do this the more hopefully 
 because philology detects certain points in common between the 
 Latin and the Celtic lanfruages which constitute a closer relation- 
 
 ^ Florus, iii. 4, Quintillian, Declaiii. pro Milite Mariano, c. 1 3. 
 
 "^ Cicero, de Oratore, ii. 66. tells of some painted representation of a Gaul 
 on the "Cimbric shield" of Marius : '^ picfu/ii Gallu/ii in Mariano saito dm- 
 brico." Comp. his treatise De Petitione lonsiilatus, c. ii. 9 ! his oration pro 
 Manio Fonteio, c. 14 ; and Sallust, De bcllo Jiigurth., c. 114. 
 
 •' Appian, De hello Illyrico, c. 4 ; Diod. Sic. v. 32. 
 
 •* Strabo, vii. c. 2, § 4 ; Mela, iii. 3. 
 
 '•' " Parva nunc civiias, sed gloria ingens." C. 37. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 59 
 
 ship than that between either and the Teutonic tongues.^ The 
 tradition in the time of the later Romans was that the Umbrians 
 of Subalpine Italy were ancient Galli, who had conquered the 
 district at a remote period, driving out of it the Siculi, who later 
 peopled Sicily, and the Veneti. If this happened, the Gauls 
 were presumably in turn conquered after a time by the invad- 
 ing Raseni or Tyrheni, (better known by their Latin name of 
 Etruscans), who came from the north of Greece ; and were either 
 enslaved or killed out or driven into the Umbrian mountains. 
 Can an early type of Gaul then be found in Umbria? The old 
 name Ombri has been surmised to be the Celtic Aml>ra = the 
 brave, and to have been a general epithet given to themselves 
 by the victorious invaders. Among the Romans, too, " Cisalpine 
 Gaul " was supposed to be peopled by the same stocks as peopled 
 Transalpine Gaul. But then in the time of Polybius, who seems 
 to have been a careful student so far as his knowledge went, the 
 Southern Galli were a semi-savage people - with no signs of the 
 civilisation and the organised cult which prevailed in Ceesar's 
 time in Gaul; so that M. Bertrand, as we have seen, decides 
 them to have been of a different race from the Galli-Celtae of 
 Caesar's description. Others, again, identify them, from their 
 skull remains, with the Ce/f^^ of cratiiology? We are left then 
 to speculate whether they were akin to the other old Italic 
 stocks; whether these, in turn, were a dark race like the Iberians; 
 and whether they originally spoke some of the Italic languages, 
 which are so comparatively near akin to the Celtic ; or whether 
 these Italic languages had been imposed on their ancestors by 
 northern " Aryan " invaders, whose type (if tall and blond) 
 disappeared in the course of centuries (as that of the later 
 Germanic conquerors has done since), but leaving the northern 
 language established (which the later invaders failed to do). 
 On any view, we look on an apparently endless vista of race 
 mixtures. 
 
 There remains the case of the Belgae, of whom Caesar learned * 
 that most of them had come from Germany (ab Germanis), 
 driving out the Galli who had formerly held the district, though 
 they were now allied with the Galli and constantly at war with 
 
 1 D'Arbois de Jubainville, Celtcs et Germains, elude graiii!)iatiiale, i8S6. 
 This writer considers that the linguistic connection points to a primitive 
 " Italo-Celtic " unity. 
 
 - Polybius, ii. 17. 
 
 •' Taylor, as cited, pp. 88, 23S. 
 
 ■» De Bello Gallico, ii. 4. 
 
60 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Germani. It is in connection with Be/gae that he tells how 
 the Ga/li, being generally tall, were wont to jeer at the small 
 stature of the Roman troops. It seems clear that the Belgae in 
 general, whatever their aspect, spoke "Gallic" and not a German 
 language ; and they are identified by some inquirers with the 
 Firbolgs of Irish tradition, who also seem by some accounts to 
 have been tall and fair.^ Once more then, proceeding on the 
 assumption that the blond types belong to one race and the dark 
 to another, we find ourselves confronted by opposed groups of 
 red-haired people speaking different languages, one of the groups 
 apparently using the tongue common to a mixed race of darker 
 people. 
 
 The truth evidently is that the words Germania and Germani 
 have no more definite racial significance than the words Gallia, 
 Ce/tica, and Galli. One and all were applied loosely in antiquity, 
 and they are applied if possible still more loosely now. For 
 Csesar, tribes outside the district which his own countrymen 
 chose to call Gallia were in the mass Germani, because they 
 fought the Galli ; and the Belgae and Helvetii were Galli be- 
 cause they fought the so-called Germani. Yet the so-called Galli 
 and Germani unquestionably fought among themselves in the 
 territories which the Romans called by their names ; and they 
 would as certainly be ready to fight kindred tribes beyond the 
 borders specified by the Romans. Cfesar himself asserts that 
 there were Galli in Germania and Germani in Gallia ; and he sets 
 out by acknowledging that Gaul contained three nations, differing 
 in language, customs, and laws. 
 
 When we closely scrutinise the testimony of Tacitus, we find 
 ourselves no nearer clearness or certainty. We have seen that 
 he classes as Germanic the Cimbri whose name in later history 
 appears only among the "Celts," and also the Caledonians of 
 Scotland, who are generally reckoned Celts. But this is not the 
 only point at which the data of Tacitus clash with the traditional 
 classification — and indeed with his own preliminary account of 
 
 ' According to Professor Sullivan, the three warring races of Firbolgs, 
 Tuatha De Danand, and Milesians or Scoti, were all alike tall and fair. 
 (Introd. to O'Curry's Lectures " On the Manners and Cnsfoms of the Ancient 
 Irish," 3 vols., London, 1873, p- Ixxii.) Indeed in O'Curry's extracts from 
 the old Irish literature there is constant mention of blonds. But j\Ir Richey 
 {Short History of the Irish People, pp. 28-29), cites MacForbis (who lived in 
 the seventeenth century), as calling the Fir-Bolg, in his Book of Genealogies, a 
 short race with dark hair and eyes ; and Mr Richey thinks the point is thus 
 settled. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 6 1 
 
 the Germans as an unmixed race.^ That view is clearly irrecon- 
 cilable, at the very outset, with the premiss that certain Germanic 
 tribes had frontier wars with non-Germanic tribes. Both sides 
 taking captives, there must have been intermixture in that 
 respect.- Freedom from recent intermixture could appear to 
 exist only among the tribes near the centre of the Germanic terri- 
 tory ; and it was doubtless these that Tacitus had in view in his 
 generalisation. As soon as we pass from that to his details, we 
 have a picture of a variegated population in Germany analogous 
 to that we have been forced to frame for Gaul. The confedera- 
 tion or agglomeration of gentes known as the Suevi, occupying 
 the greater part of Germania, so-called by the Romans, are found 
 to be distinguished from other Germans by their habit of tying 
 up their hair ; and the free Suevi are thus also distinguished 
 from the slaves.^ Among the Suevi, then, we have an enslaved 
 and a free class, and the slaves may have included any number 
 of aliens, Galli or others. Tacitus expressly records, as Caesar 
 had done before, that tribes of Gauls had invaded Germany ; 
 and to the Volcae-Tectosages, already specified by Cassar* as 
 having conquered and held Germanic territory, we have to add 
 the Helvetii, the Boii, and the populations of the Decumatian 
 Plains {Decumates agros), specified by Tacitus. Further, the 
 latter writer expressly tells us that the Gothini spoke the Gallic 
 language''' — a circumstance which (unless we take the Gallic 
 tongues to have originated in northern Europe alongside of the 
 Germanic) can only be explained by a Gallic conquest, and 
 which further creates a new difficulty for the thesis that the 
 Cialli were a Germanic race — and yet again that the Aestyii, 
 on the right bank of the Suevic sea, had the rites and customs 
 
 ^ It is interesting to note that Tacitus partly anticipates the modern view 
 that the Aryans originated in Central Europe. He argues of the Germans : — 
 " Ipsos Germanos indigenas credideriin, minimeque aliarum gentium ad- 
 ventibus et hospitiis mixtos. . . . Quis porro, praeter periculum horridi et 
 ignoti maris, Asia, aut Africa, aut Italia relicta, Germaniam peteret? in- 
 formem terris, asperam caelo, tristem cultu adspectuque, nisi si patria sit? 
 {De iiior. Germ. i. ). 
 
 ^ "In Europe, what population can pretend to purity of blood? The Basques 
 themselves, who apparently ought to be well protected by their country, 
 institutions, and language, against the invasion of foreign blood, show upon 
 certain points, in the heart of their mountains, the evident traces of the juxta- 
 position and fusion of very different races." (De Quatrefages, Huiiiau Species, 
 Eng. tr., p. 273. Cp. Vtt'XAoQ, Journal of Aiithropol., Oct. 1S70, p. 126.) 
 
 ^ Id., c. 38. 
 
 * B. G., vi., 24. = C. 43- 
 
62 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 of the Suevi, but a language nearer the Breton or Britannic 
 {propior britannka)^ besides being much more industrious than 
 the Germans in general. Tacitus also tells that this tribe, which 
 practised agriculture to an extent unusual in Crermany, wor- 
 shipped the earth-goddess, and wore as a talisman, and as sole 
 substitute for weapons, an emblem of the boar — the animal 
 sacred to the earth-goddess in many ancient cults. Now, the 
 figure of the boar has been found among Gallic remains, and is 
 confidently held by archaeologists to have been a Gallic ensign.- 
 So that here again the Galli seem marked off from the Germans, 
 despite their similarity of aspect. Finally, in his account of the 
 inhabitants of Britain,^ while tracing the red-haired Caledonians 
 directly to the Germanic stock, Tacitus distinguishes sharply 
 between the dark and curly-haired Silures, whom he regards as 
 of Iberian descent, and others whom he declares to be like the 
 Galli, without classing them with the Caledonians. His idea of 
 the Galli then would seem to be that they were not dark, yet 
 not red-haired like the Germans and Caledonians. 
 
 Thus then with one section after another of the population of 
 Ancient Gaul, supposed to be either closely akin-to or the 
 source of the populations of Ancient Britain, modern Brittany, 
 Wales, Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands, we find that the 
 boundary lines supposed to mark off the so-called Gallic or 
 Celtic stock from the so-called Germanic disappear or waver 
 on scrutiny. Everywhere the races seem partly to blend, the 
 physical traits to be in part common, the geographical distribu- 
 tion to be inextricable. Such a patient and scholarly process of 
 discrimination of early British and Irish tribes and stocks as is 
 set forth in the Celtic Britain of Professor Rhys does but leave 
 us surer that the question of race is insoluble. Between Goidelic 
 and Brythonic Celts and non-Celts, Aryans and non-Aryans, we 
 can never reach any real knowledge of race characters or types, 
 or original racial speech. All that we can discover is a series of 
 masses of barbarians, known to the more civilised peoples of 
 
 ^ C. 45- 
 
 ^ See the figure in Bertrand's Archdologie Gauloise et celtiqite, 2^ edit., near 
 end. 
 
 ■'"Habitus corporum varii ; atcjue ex eo argumenta. Namque rutiiae 
 Caledonian! habitantium coma;, magni artus, germanicam originem asseverant. 
 Silurum colorati vultus, et torti plerumque crines, et posita contra Hispania, 
 Iberos veteres traiecisse eosque sedes occupasse fidem faciunt. Proximi Gallis 
 et similes sunt. . . . Eorum sacra deprehendas superstitionum persuasione ; 
 sermo baud multum diversus." ( Jl'ta Agiicolae, c. II.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 6 
 
 O 
 
 their time by loose generic titles, any one of which would serve 
 to cover indefinite tracts of northern Europe, and a multitude of 
 independent tribes and hostile confederations. From this chaos 
 of ancient barbarism there survive certain groups of /angtias^es, 
 two of which are known to us as Celtic and Teutonic ; but so 
 far from these languages giving us a clue to the stock or pedigree 
 of the peoples who now speak them, we find many reasons for 
 believing that in antiquity peoples of apparently the most 
 different stocks, in age after age, entered into the use of the 
 same language, just as has happened in our own era. A race, 
 in any sense known to us, and at any distance of time at which 
 it can be traced, is such a complex of elements that the tradi- 
 tional assumption of special and rooted mental characteristics 
 becomes simply fantastic when compared with the facts. The 
 theory of race pedigree, in fact, crumbles to nullity in the case 
 of Celts and Teutons just as it does in the case of Hebrews, 
 Moabites, Midianites, Ishmaelites, Heraclidse, and Romans. 
 When, after seeking vainly in the ancient documents for some 
 criterion or clear distinction among race types in terms at once 
 of language and aspect, we attempt to find a meaning in race 
 names themselves, instead of getting any new light we are led 
 to the surmise that the very conception of race is a relatively 
 modern and factitious development. Of the etymological pre- 
 misses on which — taking the traditional method for what it may 
 be worth — we have above sought to reach rational conclusions, 
 not one escapes suspicion on strict scrutiny. Every name in 
 turn is found susceptible of conflicting explanations. The name 
 Teuton, which in modern times serves to indicate the whole of 
 the peoples speaking the " Germanic " languages, is historically 
 the name of only one Germanic tribe — that which invaded Italy 
 with the Cimbri and was destroyed with them — and was never 
 applied by either the Germani or the Romans to the Germanic 
 peoples collectively. Its modern use appears to be purely 
 fallacious. It connects with the Gothic t/iiuda, the Old Norse 
 thjod, and the Anglo-Saxon theod, all signifying "a people."' 
 From the same root appears to have come the German word 
 Diet; and the modern word Deutsch or Teutsch, which now stands 
 for " German," simply meant the vernacular language, the 
 language of the people, as distinguished from the Latin of the 
 scholarly class, whose civilisation came through the lore of 
 Rome. But the word is not specially Germanic. The Irish 
 tiiath signifies "a tribe"; the Breton //^^= people; and the 
 Welsh tud, which now means a country, is at bottom the same 
 
 1 
 
64 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 word, since "foreigner" in \N'elsh was alltud^ even as eltheod is 
 " foreigner " in Anglo-Saxon. Furthermore, the Oscan tau/a, 
 toieto, and the Sabine touta, tota, also signified " a community " ; 
 and it is probable that " the Gaulish word for a people or com- 
 munity was toutar'^ Then the old name Teiito7ies xwz.-^ d& \sqS\. 
 have been given to a "Celtic" as to a "Germanic" tribe, whether 
 by themselves or by their neighbours. It stands for no traceable 
 pedigree. And if there be any weight whatever in the tests of 
 skull-shape and of prevailing complexion, the giving of the name 
 " Teutonic " to all the " Scandinavian " stocks indiscriminately is 
 a mere perversion of the facts, since there is alike traditional and 
 craniological evidence that the historic Danes differed widely 
 from the Teutonic type ; and Scandinavian scholars have held ^ 
 that in that region there was first a broad-headed non-Teutonic 
 race, then a Gothic, then a Celtic, introducing bronze — all 
 preceding the historic Swedes. 
 
 Again, we find that Galli may have meant, in a " Celtic " 
 speech, either " the blond " or " the strong ; " and the question 
 arises whether the early Roman name for the Northern races did 
 not simply mean, like the Latin Galbi, "the yellow people." But 
 on the other hand, as before noted, the word Gall in the Erse 
 dialect means "a stranger,"^ whence arises the query whether 
 the name may not first have arisen through the different " Gallic " 
 tribes so specifying each other, with the final result of making 
 the name cover tribes speaking another tongue than theirs. 
 The name Armorica, anciently given to Brittany, whence the 
 name Armoricans for the people, simply meant Sea-side, and may 
 have been given by others to a population who had no such 
 word. We saw that Ceiltach or Coiltach may mean forest-dweller 
 or secluded dweller, and that Caledon may mean forest-land ; 
 but the word Caledon or Calyddon may no more have been the 
 home-name of northern Scotland for the ancient people called 
 Caledonians than the German name Wdlsch ( = Italian) is the 
 Italian name for Italians. The "Welsh" are to-day known to 
 Englishmen by a name which is probably German in origin, 
 meaning simply " foreigners." M. Gaston Paris, followed by M. 
 D'Arbois de Jubainville, derives the word from the Valah, the 
 supposed Germanic name for the Celtic or Gallic tribe called by 
 Polybius and Ccesar Volcae, and anciently situated north of the 
 
 1 Professor Rhys, Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom, p. 45. 
 
 2 Professor Nilsson, of Lund, in Report cf British Association for 1847,. 
 
 p. 31- 
 
 2 Gall is the Irish and Scotch-Highland word for a non-Gael. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 65 
 
 Upper Danube and in (lermany as well as in south-west France. 
 It is further connected with Bolgae (said by an ancient poet to 
 be the original form of the name), and so with the Belgae and the 
 Irish Fir-Bolgs. Here we have one of the slightest identifica- 
 tions that have met us in our inquiry ; yet for all we know it 
 may be true. There is no weight of evidence either way. Volcae 
 looks more like the German Volk ( = folk) than anything else ; 
 and Volcae- Tectosages always suggests a compound name given 
 by German-speakers to describe a particular " folk," but the 
 resemblance settles nothing. A natural surmise is that if Valah 
 be identical with Welsh, it is also identical with IVallach ; and 
 when we learn that the Wallachians are mostly shortish, dark- 
 eyed, black-haired, and unlike Magyars, Germans, or Slaves, 
 we begin to presume them certainly Celtic and non-Teutonic. 
 Prichard and others, however, have seen reason to identify them 
 with the ancient Getae or Dacians, and to hold them " the only 
 living representatives of the ancient Thracian race " ^ — which may 
 or may not have been Celtic. 
 
 The word Gennant, in turn, has no more of sure basis. For 
 Strabo, it meant simply " kindred," and he thought the Germans 
 were so called as being " germane " in appearance to the Galli.^ 
 Tacitus, in an apparently corrupt passage, says that the name 
 was given " through fear," but leaves its meaning an enigma.^ 
 The theory that " German " meant gi{erre-xm.n, warrior, is no 
 better and no worse ; as is the etymological theory that gallus = 
 cock comes from a form garlics, " akin to the Sanskrit root gar " 
 = to make a sound, whence the Latin verb garrio, to chatter. 
 On the other hand it has been suggested that Germati was a 
 Gallic epithet, from garin or gairtti, meaning clamour ; and yet 
 again that it came from gair or ger, meaning neighbouring or 
 neighbour, the man in Celtic signifying small ! For Carlyle, 
 finally, the name German suggests an original Garman, the 
 man who compels or gars {Scoilice) ; etymology thus lending 
 itself to every man's fancy or prejudice in turn. There is really 
 no good reason to suppose that in antiquity the multitude of 
 separately-named tribes whom the Romans called Germatii had 
 any general name for themselves. The later named Alle/iiatitii 
 ( = All men) has been supposed to be a title invented to indicate 
 
 ^ Dr J. A. Meigs, in Nott and Gliddon's Indigenous Races 0/ the Earth, 
 1857, p. 308. 
 
 - Strabo, vii., c. i. § 2. 
 
 ■'' De moi: Germ. c. 2. See Uollzniann [A'elten iind Geniianni, S. 42 sq.) 
 for an elahorate discussion of the passage, fie takes Strabo's view of the word. 
 
 E 
 
66 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 that certain hordes invading Italy were made up of a great many 
 stocks ; but as to this also there is no certainty ; and as the 
 word gar in German still has in a sense the force of "all," there 
 arises the further hypothesis that Germani and Allemanni were 
 two dialect-names with the same meaning.^ 
 
 In all directions the race-names offer similar perplexities. 
 The tribe-name Briton, whence we have Britannia, Britain, and 
 Brittany, is traced by Professor Rhys, in the form of Brython, to 
 a word meaning clothed or cloth-clad ; and he surmises that the 
 tribe in question used the name to mark themselves off from 
 the non-Aryan aborigines whom they found wearing skins. This 
 seems at first sight unlikely enough, but it is perhaps as likely as 
 any other view. In any case, the name was that of only one 
 section of supposed Celts, and " no Goidels, in the linguistic 
 sense of the word, are found to have been called Brittones either 
 by themselves or by the other Celts within historical times."- 
 Add to this that Iberi possibly meant just the Further people ; 
 and that the Germanic Ingaevojies, Istaevones, and Hermiones of 
 Tacitus were presumably just the Inwohner, Wesiwohner, and 
 Herumwohner, the Inland-dwellers, West-dwellers, and Hither- 
 dwellers ; and the racial significance of racial names can be 
 broadly estimated. 
 
 Nor can the perplexities of the verbalist method be cleared up 
 by any resort to archaeological clues. Great hopes have been 
 founded on the evidence of the shapes of skulls found in 
 different regions ; and something like general views have been 
 reached on a basis of the comparison of graves, tombs and 
 other structures. But on neither line can we reach any certainty 
 of historical discrimination in the present connection. It has 
 been again and again shown that no large group of European 
 skulls of any period is definitely marked off from the others, 
 there being round, broad, and long heads in nearly all col- 
 lections ; ^ while in regard to dolmens, tumuli, and other 
 
 ^ According to Adelung (/4<r/to/£ Geschichte der Deutschcn, Sect. viii. , par. l) 
 there were in the different German dialects at one time as many as iii distinct 
 names for a horse, of which only five remain. Another light on the imaginary 
 " Aryan " unity of the Teutonic-speaking race. 
 
 " Celtic Jh-itaiti, pp. 205-211. 
 
 •' See Roget de Belloguet, Ethnogilnic Gauloise : W^ Partie, Types Gaulois, 
 p. 182. Dr Taylor {Origin of the Aryans, p. 79) alleges a partial division. 
 But as his own data constantly show (see, for instance, p. 86), the so-called 
 broad skulls often vary towards the long type, and vice versa. The mean 
 or average measurements thus tend to set up a wrong impression, as do 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 67 
 
 evidences of modes of burial there is the baffling difficulty 
 that we can never be sure which race, by historical nomenclature, 
 introduced any one fashion.^ Dolmens raised on tumuli point 
 to the superposition of one cult or custom on another ; but the 
 dolmen-builders in that case may have been descendants of the 
 mound-heapers who had adopted the use of dolmens on contact 
 with another people, conquering or conquered by them. 
 
 Seeking for general principles, we may frame the hypothesis 
 that the practice of burning the dead, Hke that of embalmment, 
 would naturally originate in warm climates, where the dangers of 
 burial would soon force themselves on notice, and compel resort 
 to some means of preventing the process of putrefaction. But 
 when we go into historic detail we find that certain peoples 
 refused to practise cremation where their neighbours used it, 
 while others seem to have adopted cremation after the example 
 of their neighbours. There is evidence that certain of the Celtae 
 in Spain held it impious to burn their dead, and left them to be 
 devoured by birds of prey, who were supposed to carry the souls 
 to heaven.^ This corresponds almostly exactly with the persistent 
 practice of the Parsees, who, like the Celtae, may be supposed to 
 have stuck to the usages of ancestors inhabiting a cold country. 
 But other peoples of presumably northern descent are found to 
 have gradually accepted the practice of cremation — e.g. in ancient 
 India and ancient Rome — in imitation of the southern races 
 
 the graphic presentments of the extreme case as "types" [e.g. p. 71). The 
 variations ought to raise afresh the question whether (to say nothing of the 
 barbaric practice of skull deformation in infancy) differences in skull shape do 
 not result from traceable causes. On the other hand, those who, with Dr 
 Taylor, hold skull shape to be fixed and hereditary (despite the variations from 
 the mean) ought surely to regard all dolichocephalic and all brachycephalic 
 races as respectively akin. Yet Dr Taylor does not seem to infer any kinship 
 between the dolichocephalic Iberians and the dolichocephalic Teutons, though 
 he inclines (pp. 70, 92) to see kinship between the brachycephalic " Celts " and 
 " Turanians," and though, further, it might reasonably be argued that the 
 short Ilierians and the tall Teutons had merely been differentiated by widely 
 different life conditions during long periods. 
 
 ^ Thus Professor Rhys (Celtic Britain, pp. 258-259) surmises that the 
 Brythonic Celts of Britain buried in barrows, while the Goidelic Celts dug 
 graves, yet in some instances adopted the Brythonic fashion of mounds. And 
 this leaves open the question of the practice of the pre-Celtic population, 
 which " profoundly modified " the Goidelic {Id., id.). 
 
 - Silius Italicus, iii. 340-342. The Celto-Scythae, again, are recorded to 
 have embalmed the heads of their dead (Pomponius Mela, ii. i); while the 
 Galatae in their invasion of Greece scandalised the Greeks by leaving their 
 slain unburied (Pansanias, x. 21). 
 
68 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 among whom their ancestors had entered ; while on the other 
 hand dark races, presumed to be of southern descent, are found 
 to revert in northern countries to the practice of burial. Thus 
 mortuary remains, like the other clues, fail to apprise us of any 
 primordial and persistent distinctions of race.^ 
 
 Supposing we agree to mark off as distinct races the inhabitants 
 at a given time of lands where we find skulls tending in the main 
 either to the long or the broad type, making a further distinction 
 between tall and short long-headed races, we are still without any 
 proof as to any hereditary moral characteristics in the various 
 species ; and we are further entirely precluded from identifying 
 any one type with any nation in historic times. If the " Celts " 
 be the tall broad -headed race of the " round barrows " of Britain, 
 then the Celtic skull is identical with typical Latin and Umbrian 
 skulls,^ also with typical Helvetic skulls, also with a typical 
 Danish skull of the neolithic period.^ And this " race " is " now 
 represented by the Danes, the Slaves, and some of the Irish."* 
 That is to say, a people commonly described as Teutonic, the 
 Danish, is typically " Celtic " ; as is also the ancient Roman and 
 the modern Russian ; and the modern Irish have certain affinities 
 in all these directions. If again the Celts be the short and 
 dark and long-headed race loosely alluded to as the " Iberians," 
 whose skulls are found in the " long barrows " of Britain, and 
 who are supposed to have been overrun by the tall broad-headed 
 people above considered as the possible Celts, then the Celtic 
 race to-day is " represented by some of the Welsh and Irish, by 
 the Corsicans, and by the Spanish Basques."^ On that view, 
 Napoleon may have been a Celt ; as Casar may have been on 
 the former view. But if, yet again, the Celts be really the short 
 broad-headed race, whose skulls are found in Switzerland and 
 Central France, and who are loosely described as " Ligurians," 
 (or sometimes " Lappanoids ") then the Celtic race is " now 
 represented by the Auvergnats, the Savoyards, and the Szviss" ^ 
 
 ^ Compare for instance the maps in M. Bertrand's Arckeologie celtiqiie et 
 gauloise with those in Dr Sople Bryant's Celtic Ireland. M. Bertrand draws 
 a line showing a broad separation between dolmens and tumuli-with-iron. It 
 goes nearly due north from Marseilles to Rheims, then north-eastwards, 
 parallel with the coast-line. He puts Galatae, using iron, east and south of 
 that line and "nameless populations," with Celts and Hyperboreans, using 
 bronze, mostly west and north of it. Dr Bryant seeks to get ethnological 
 guidance from the tumuli and dolmens, but her race-maps do not at all coin- 
 cide with those of M. Bertrand. 
 
 "^ Taylor, as cited, pp. 88-89. ^ Id., p. 82. ■» Id., p. 214. 
 
 5 Id., p. 214. " Id., p. 214. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 69 
 
 If that confusion is not sufficiently confounded, the reader 
 may add to it by collating the further theory, above considered, 
 that the tall Galli and Caledonians were Teutonic. Dr Taylor, 
 who presents to us so many perplexities, puts aside this, deciding 
 with surprising confidence that 
 
 "There is a superficial resemblance between the Teutons and the 
 Celts, but they are radically distinguished by the form of the skull. 
 No anthropologist would admit that the Row Grave skulls and the 
 round barrow skulls could belong to the same race. Both races, 
 however, were tall, large-limbed, and fair-haired. But the pink and 
 white complexion of the Teuton is different from the more florid com- 
 plexion of the Celt, who is inclined to freckle. The eyes of the pure 
 Teutons are blue, those of the Celts green, grey, or greyish-blue. The 
 hair of the Teutons is golden ; that of the Celts is often fiery red. In 
 the Roman period the Gauls are described as resembling the Germans, 
 but not so tall, so fair, or so savage." ^ 
 
 Dr Taylor here accepts as decisive a few ancient testimonies 
 which are contradicted by others;- yet he had just before cited, 
 without comment, the statement of Tacitus, that the Germans 
 had red {rutilie) hair. And as he cannot prove that the ruling 
 Galli or Celtae of Ctesar were either freckled or broad-headed, 
 since he cannot identify their skulls ; and as he points out that 
 there are dark and red-haired types ^ among the Scottish High- 
 landers,'* and short dark dolichocephali and tall red-haired brachy- 
 cephali in Ireland,'' he supplies no solution of the sociological 
 imbroglio set up by the traditional characterisations of Celts and 
 Teutons. Indeed he expressly complains that the name " Celt," 
 though fixed in anthropology, is a source of great confusion. 
 
 1 Taylor, as cited, p. 109. On this general view the Danes ( = Dr Taylor's 
 Celts) should be mostly green or grey-eyed, red-haired, and freckled, as compared 
 with the yellow-haired, blue-eyed pink and white Swedes ( = his Teutons). 
 Yet he tells us (p. 84) that "the hair of the Danes, according to Dr Beddoe, 
 is either pale yellow or light-brown, and their eyes are . . . usually either 
 blue or bluish-grey." On the other hand, the Danes of British tradition were 
 dark ; and the Highland name Dougal, often taken as typically Celtic, is held 
 to have been applied by Celts to Danes, meaning as it does dark straiigey-. 
 
 ^ See Dr V>&Ai\oQ, Joiirtial of Aiithropology, Oct. 1870, pp. 123-124 ; and cp. 
 Galen, as cited above, p. 55, note. 
 
 •* He instances the MacGrcgors and Camerons as red-haired claus. Yet I 
 have known dark Highlanders of both names. The very name Rob Roy ( = red) 
 shows that red hair was not general among the MacGregors of last century. 
 
 ■* P. 78. '■' P. I ID. 
 
70 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 We end by noting, with Broca, that ancient Celticity can be 
 viewed under four aspects/ there being : — 
 
 1. The "Celts of history " — the peoples of the confederations 
 
 of Central Gaul. 
 
 2. The " Celts of linguistics " — spreading from Ireland to 
 
 Galatia. 
 
 3. The " Celts of archaeology " — the beginners of the bronze 
 
 age, who were broad-headed. 
 
 4. The " Celts of craniology," (found in Scandinavia as well 
 
 as further south) who were either broad- or narrow-headed.^ 
 And these four certainly cannot be proved to be one. 
 
 The only course for reasonable students seems to be to 
 abandon once for all the theory of primordial and persistent 
 type-differences in the speakers of different languages. But the 
 ancient presupposition of race-tendencies, capacities, proclivities, 
 is so tenacious, so conformable to a psychological bias which is 
 common to all races and nearly all men, that after the old 
 formulas have been discredited there is still the tendency to put 
 equivalent formulas in their places. Thus we find some sociolo- 
 gists restating the case thus. They surrender the old definitions 
 of "Celt" and "Teuton," and propose to make the name "Celtic" 
 apply loosely, for mere purposes of convenience, not to the 
 Celts and Galli " proper " but to the prehistoric " Iberian " or 
 " Ligurian " or " Silurian " or " Lappanoid " inhabitants of Gallia 
 and the early inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, without attempt- 
 ing to make out in what degree these populations were " non- 
 Germanic " at the beginning of our era, and without noting that 
 the so-called Germanic peoples of Scandinavia and Germany in 
 turn included large Celtic elements. Having thus conveniently 
 got rid of the old difficulties and put the case in the most 
 suitable form for a new vindication, they afiirm that the history 
 of the two stocks (both later inextricably mixed, on their own 
 showing) within the historic period is sufficient to show a funda- 
 mental difference in political capacity, which difference, they 
 once more argue, is to be ascribed to some special characteristics, 
 acquired it may be in long prehistoric ages, in the stocks which 
 p7-edominate in the so-called Celtic and Germanic countries — in 
 France as contrasted with Germany ; in Ireland as contrasted 
 with England. All the while they ignore {a) the modern de- 
 monstration that the "Teutonic" race-type of antiquity is dying 
 
 ^ Mimoires Anthropologiqitcs , i. 375. 
 
 ^ For Retzius and many others, the Celts were dolichocephalic. Cp. Taylor, 
 as cited, p. 226 ; and Beddoe, as cited, p. 1 18. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 7 I 
 
 out, and that modern Germany, for instance, approximates in the 
 main, as regards type-aspects, to modern France. They further 
 abstain from anything Hke a scientific calculation of {b) the 
 proportion of non-Teutonic blood in the population of early 
 England, which is now generally admitted to have conserved a 
 great deal of the ancient British^ (already much mixed) with that of 
 the invading Anglo-Saxons and (Celtic ?) Danes ; which was further 
 much mixed under the Norman and Angevin kings ; but which 
 is yet habitually spoken of as a "Teutonic" people. Equally they 
 waive all pretence of {c) an estimate of the amount of " Celtic " 
 population in English-speaking Scotland, of Scotch-Celtic and 
 Irish population in modern England, and of "Teutonic" stock 
 in Ireland. As a matter of fact the clue of modern nanus, the 
 only available one in this case, proves that there are in England 
 and Scotland millions of nominally non-Teutonic people — the 
 Welsh name Jones, for instance, being one of the very com- 
 monest in England, while in Scotland the clan names beginning 
 with " Mac " are extremely numerous in the Lowlands — and that 
 in Ireland, though Mr Huxley and Mr Lecky and Mr Gladstone 
 are probably wrong in supposing the bulk of the population to be 
 of " Anglo-Saxon " descent, there are myriads whose ancestors 
 entered the island within the last three hundred years.^ All 
 these considerations are got over by even the most scientifically 
 disposed of the racial school, who are content to take for granted 
 a probable majority of a given descent, and to assume that such 
 a majority must needs determine a country's history in respect 
 of their racial tendencies. They thus reafifirm, while disclaiming 
 all race-prejudice, the old doctrine visibly formulated by race- 
 prejudice, only offering new arguments and abandoning most of 
 the old. 
 
 And as the new doctrine, though put forward by far more 
 circumspect reasoners than the old school of Celtophobes, is in 
 the opinion of some of us just as erroneous and just as ill- 
 founded as the old, it remains to deal with it on its merits as 
 we have dealt with that. 
 
 ^ See below, sec. v. Cp. Mr Grant Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain, ch. 7 ; the 
 Rev. H. M. Scarth, Roman Britain, p. 227 ; and the criticism of Mr Free- 
 man's Teutonist assumptions in the Anthropological Review, Jan. 1870. 
 
 "^ The two leaders who virtually constituted the present Irish National move- 
 ment, and whose animosity to England was certainly as strong as that of any 
 of their followers, bore respectively English and Scotch names. The name of 
 Parnell is English, and that of Biggar Lowland-Scotch. 
 
THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 § 6. " Celtic " and " Teutonic " History. 
 
 Apart from the much more primitive Hfe-conditions of the 
 peoples beyond the Rhine, who were mostly hunters and 
 brigands, with little agriculture and no towns, holding land by 
 nomadic tenures, only one marked difference is noted by 
 Julius C?esar between the social structures of the Galli and of 
 the Germani. That is, the Gallic institution of the Druidic 
 priesthood.^ Whereas the Druids in Gaul were a numerous and 
 powerful order, which many of the aristocracy were glad to join, 
 the Germans beyond the Rhine seem to have had no organised 
 priesthood whatever. Tacitus so far corroborates Caesar. 
 
 Druidism is certainly a notable sociological phenomenon. We 
 know little about it; but that little is enough to constitute a 
 quite definite problem. Unless Caesar has grossly exaggerated 
 the facts, the Druids were one of the most influential priesthoods 
 of antiquity ; and before Caesar their name and prestige seem to 
 have reached Greece.^ Such an institution, which it must have 
 taken a long time to evolve, seems to some students to mark 
 off the Galli as moved by tendencies different from those pre- 
 valent among the Germani — tendencies to the erection of a 
 priestly tyranny, subversive of intellectual and personal freedom. 
 When, however, we seek for the historic origins, we find reason 
 to surmise that Druidism belongs neither to the Galli or Celtae 
 so-called nor to the presumed older population. We may indeed 
 surmise that the older population had a priesthood. The ancient 
 stock called Iberians in Asia Minor ^ are recorded by Strabo to 
 have had four social grades: (i) that of the "old and wise"; 
 (2) that of the priests ; (3) that of the soldiers and agriculturists ; 
 (4) that of the common people, who were the serfs of the kings. '^ 
 The holders of property, too, were not individuals but families. 
 Here we have a state of society in which the priesthood is visibly 
 very powerful ; and if we suppose the ancient Iberians of Spain 
 and Aquitaine and the kindred Liguri to be akin to the Iberians 
 of Armenia, and to have constituted the lower orders in Gallia 
 after the conquest by the Celtae-Galli, we may further suppose 
 
 ^ De bcllo Gaiiico, vi. 21-24. Csesar attributes to greater luxuriousness of life 
 a relative inferiority of valour among the Galli. 
 
 "^ Though some of the supposed ancient allusions will not bear investigation. 
 See D'Arbois de Jubainville, Introduction a l\'tiide de la littt'ratiirc celtiqiie. 
 
 ^ In the north of Armenia. 
 
 ■* Strabo, B. xi., c. 3, par, 6. Cp. c. 4, par. 7-8, as to the priests and rites 
 of the Asiatic Albani, who also revered old age. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 73 
 
 them to have had a priesthood which was the nucleus of the 
 Druid order, and which retained its power under the conquerors 
 as did the Christian priesthood later. But a special feature in 
 the description of ancient Druidism is that Cassar declares its 
 headquarters to have been the British Islands, whence it was 
 imported into Gallia.^ This at once suggests a connection with 
 the Phoenicians, who had for centuries traded with Britain for 
 tin, and w^ho constituted the one foreign culture-influence that 
 the pre-Roman Britons could undergo. And as the sacrificial 
 usages of the Druids — especially the burning of victims in great 
 osier-cages shaped like men - — closely resemble those of the 
 Moloch-worshipping Carthaginians, we are much better entitled 
 to look to early Phoenician influence for the development of 
 Druidism (on a basis, it may be, of a primitive "Iberian" priest- 
 hood which had already sacrificial usages) than to suppose that in 
 remote primeval Britain there had been independently evolved an 
 elaborate esoteric doctrine of immortality and planetary influences 
 and cosmic origins such as Caesar describes.^ The evolution of 
 
 ^ De bello Gallico, vi. 13. 
 
 - Id., vi. 16. The Druids also seem to have worn black robes like the priests 
 of Saturn. See Strabo, B. iii. 
 
 ^ Cp. Pliny, B. xvi. c. 95. I find the Phoenician hypothesis well worked out by 
 Moke, Histoire des Francs, 1835, pp. 422-441. For another theory of Druidism, 
 which must be admitted to be weighty, see Professor Rhys's Celtic Britain, 
 2nd ed., pp. 69-73. Professor Rhys surmises Druidism to have been pre- 
 Celtic, and to have been accepted by the " Goidelic " Celts but not by the 
 " Brythonic " Celts. The cosmogonic element in Druidism he supposes to 
 have been derived from the Mediterranean civilisation by way of Marseilles ; 
 and the resort of Gaulish students to Britain, he suggests, may have been by 
 way of getting back to the more "rugged and horrible " but more sacrosanct 
 lore of the early non-Aryan cult. This theory coincides with that above 
 offered to the extent of assuming a primitive priesthood on which a later in- 
 fluence worked. I may point out however that Professor Rhys — in saying 
 that beyond the passage in Festus Avienus, of which he makes light, " there is 
 not a scrap of evidence, linguistic or other, of the presence of Phoenicians in 
 Britain at any time " — makes too little of the testimony of Strabo (iii. 5, end) 
 that the Phoenicians were anciently the sole traders with the Cassiterides. It 
 is true that the identity of these islands is in doubt (see Elton's Origins of 
 English History, 2nd ed. , 1890, pp. 10-23), but it is really not proved that 
 they were not, as was long held, the Scilly Isles ; and in the very nature of 
 the case, as put by Strabo, the Carthaginians were moved to keep the sources 
 of their tin supply as far as possible secret. In this connection I may further 
 venture to suggest that Professor Rhys might consider the virtual correspon- 
 dence of such a goddess-name as the Gaulish Bclcsama (see his Celtic Heathendom, 
 p. 46, &c.) with the Phoenician Bel-Sama, to say nothing of the coincidence of 
 the doctrine of triads. 
 
74 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Druidism among the "Celts," then, (though our explanation is 
 only a tentative one), was probably a process closely corresponding 
 to the growth of the Christian priesthood everywhere in modern 
 Europe — an imposition of a systematised and sophisticated cult 
 on simple-minded barbarians to begin with. In any case, nothing 
 can rationally be inferred from it as to any bias towards sacer- 
 dotalism among the " Celtic race." It is the modern representa- 
 tives of the Galli, the French, who of all European nations have 
 most completely subordinated their priesthood ; so that it is 
 unnecessary to rest upon any hypothesis of origins by way of 
 clearing the racial issue. And it is the more surprising to find 
 that issue raised in this connection by a student who in other 
 cases sets aside the assumption of backward tendencies among 
 the Celts. Dr Taylor indeed puts his proposition as impartially 
 as may be ^ : — 
 
 "The Christianity of the New Testament, with its peacefulness, its 
 submissiveness, and its resignation, in which it agrees with Islam (!) and 
 other Oriental faiths, was contrary to the inner genius of the Teutonic 
 race, with its independence, its self-will, its free life, and its contentious- 
 ness. Hence the Teutonic races, in which these Aryan characteristics 
 are the most strongly developed, were the last to submit to the yoke of 
 the Gospel. It was only when the Goths had settled within the bounds 
 of the Roman empire that they were converted ; and when they 
 were converted it was to a rationalistic form of Christianity ; it was 
 Arianism and not Catholicism which they were willing to accept." - 
 
 1 shall deal later with the modern application of Dr Taylor's 
 thesis ; but in the meantime it will sufifice to point out the 
 complete arbitrariness, scientifically speaking, of the foregoing 
 generalisation, which the writer illustrates by citing Ctesar's pic- 
 ture of the Druidism of France and of the lack of an organised 
 priesthood in Germany. Let us put a few test questions. 
 
 1. If the elements of "peacefulness" and "resignation" be 
 common to Christianity and Islam, why should not Christianity 
 from the first have served the Teutonic purposes as easily as did 
 Islam those of the militarist Saracens ? 
 
 2. Were the Gauls then so comparatively peace-loving and so 
 submissive as the argument implies ? Were they not on the 
 
 ^ He explains in a footnote that his statement of the case is " little more 
 than a summary of the somewhat speculative remarks of Poesche and Penka." 
 But if he thinks the speculations fallacious, he should have rebutted them as 
 he does others. 
 
 2 Or!\qin of the Aryans, pp. 246-247. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 75 
 
 contrary anciently reputed more turbulent and insubordinate 
 than the Germans? 
 
 3. Is not "self-will" as favourable to Athanasianism as to 
 Arianism ? If not, why did not the self-willed Gauls become 
 Arians ? 
 
 4. If Christianity be contrary to the "inner genius" of the 
 Teutonic race, how came it that the Anglo-Saxons accepted it 
 as thoroughly as did the Gauls ? 
 
 It is plain that the theory is forced on the facts. The Teutonic 
 races were later converted to Christianity, as they came later 
 under all the other i7ifluences of soiitherti civilisation : that is all. 
 No more for them than for any other race did the quietist pre- 
 scriptions of the Christian books prevent the adoption or pro- 
 fession of the Christian creed. That their early bias to Arianism 
 turned on proximate grounds, and had nothing to do with "inner 
 genius of race," is shown by the fact that in the countries most 
 strictly Teutonic according to the theory — Sweden and Norway, 
 for instance, — there has been in modern times no more Uni- 
 tarianism or Deism than anywhere else, less indeed than in 
 England and France. The whole line of the explanation is 
 wrong. 
 
 Apart from that phenomenon of an organised priesthood, 
 which we have thus left with only a tentative explanation, there 
 will be found on comparison nothing in the so-called Gallic or 
 Celtic and Germanic communities of antiquity which indicates 
 anything like a fundamental difference in political capacity. The 
 Roman commonplace in regard to the Galli and Britanni was 
 that they lacked the capacity for union ; that they were always 
 divided among themselves ; and that by reason of these divisions 
 they fell a prey to the Roman invader. It was further said of 
 them that they were inconstant both in war and in diplomacy, 
 making a bold front but readily giving way on a check. On 
 reflection, it is a little surprising, but on further reflection it is 
 less surprising, that such a charge, coming from such a people,^ 
 should ever have had any weight with civilised readers. It belongs 
 
 1 It is true that Polybius (ii. 32 ; iii. 70) though a Greek, uses the customary 
 Roman language as to the Galli ; and it is not to be disputed (see below, 
 sect, vii.) that all barbaric races in warfare are apt to give way when their first 
 onset fails. But Polybius was a thorough partisan of the Roman power ; and 
 as regards warfare, it is easy to see in his own narrative that the Gauls had 
 given way only when they found their weapons hopelessly bad as against the 
 Roman — a contingency in which Roman armies themselves always broke 
 down in the same fashion. 
 
76 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 to the most primitively superficial order of political criticism. The 
 Romans themselves, to begin with, had been as much divided 
 against each other as any nation in history. From time imme- 
 morial, according to tradition, the plehs had been chronically at 
 daggers drawn with the aristocracy ; and in the age of Julius 
 Caesar the old elements of discord, complicated by the element 
 of the Italian population not living in the city itself, led to a 
 series of civil wars of the most desperate kind. Had a barbarian 
 enemy seized the opportunity of those social civil strifes to fall 
 upon Rome, the Romans might or might not have instantly united 
 for the common cause. As it happened, no barbarian enemy was 
 at hand, the defeat of the Cimbri and Teutones by Marius hav- 
 ing left his party and Sylla's free to fight in Rome till they were 
 weary. But it is safe to say that, apart from the special military 
 genius of Marius, Sylla, Caesar, and Augustus, any enemy who 
 was relatively as strong against the Romans as was Caesar or 
 Agricola against the Gauls or Britons, might much more easily 
 have overthrown Rome than Rome did the Galli and the 
 Britanni. We are apt to forget, first, that Rome was pre- 
 eminently the militarist state of the ancient European world — 
 as much specialised for militarism as is modern England for the 
 application of coal to industry ; and, second, that the numerous 
 Roman aristocracy, a body of military and administrative experts, 
 naturally yielded a larger crop of great generals, from generation 
 to generation, than any other community could. That such 
 generals, in such a community, utilising all its military resources, 
 should have conquered the combinations of the barbarians of 
 the north, was almost a matter of course. 
 
 Yet with all these advantages, we know from the Roman 
 historians themselves, Roman armies often gave way in panic 
 in the field ; and the rivalries of Roman generals often en- 
 dangered campaigns. Caesar's enemies at Rome, he tells us, 
 sent messages to Ariovistus promising him great rewards if he 
 should destroy Caesar. And Caesar's own legions were again and 
 again withheld from panic and defeat only by Caesar's own 
 intense determination. It was the triumph of genius, of a highly 
 evolved brain, over inferior forms of will and intelligence. Pitted 
 against the barbarian Vercingetorix, he was once all but out- 
 generalled ; and the relative primitiveness of the barbarian — 
 Celt or Teuton, whichever he were — does not altogether disad- 
 vantage him in our eyes in comparison with his cooler antagonist 
 when we read how he at last galloped out of his despairing 
 garrison to give himself up to the enemy, seeking so to help his 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 77 
 
 beaten followers. Cssar, if defeated at Pharsalia, might have 
 faced the worst in a colder fashion, but he could not in any more 
 heroical. On the other hand, when we remember what the 
 Gallic and Britannic populations were, the marvel is not that they 
 did not unite better but that they ever united at all. The 
 Romans expressed themselves on this subject under the influence 
 of a commonplace hallucination. They knew that the peoples 
 of Gaul and Britian were not two homogeneous nations but groups 
 of hostile nations, of different stocks, often at war with each 
 other. Yet they confusedly described them as divided peoples 
 — divided because of a passion for division. That Gauls and 
 Britons should combine against Rome was really not much more 
 natural than that the Greeks should have combined with the 
 Romans against Carthage. Their failure to combine was certainly 
 not more complete, in a general way, than the failure of the 
 Greek States to combine against Philip, or later against Rome. 
 And their action, finally, will bear comparison from any point of 
 view with that of the Anglo-Saxons who could combine neither 
 against Danes nor against Normans, and of those German States 
 which in our own century joined the first Napoleon in fighting 
 against Prussia. To charge the ancient Celt with incapacity for 
 union while citing the modern Teuton as the type of the capacity, 
 really seems quite gratuitously unreasonable. 
 
 When we turn from the comparison with civilised States to a 
 comparison of ancient "Celtic" disunion with that of ancient 
 Teutonism, the anti-Celtic generalisation seems still more vain. 
 Everything that can be said of the Gauls or Britons on that 
 head can be at least as truly said of all the northern populations 
 whatsoever. We have just seen it avowed by Teutonic writers 
 that " contentiousness " is a special Teutonic characteristic. 
 And there is more evidence than that. Aristotle, whose wisdom 
 in this matter was pretty much as the foolishness of ordinary 
 Greeks, laid it down^ that the northern European peoples, 
 though very brave, were " apolitical " or incapable of political or- 
 ganisation, and that it was for this reason they never succeeded 
 in subjecting each other — a singular proposition on the part of 
 a member of a Greek City State. Some moderns, on the other 
 hand, decide that the Greeks themselves were signally and fatally 
 deficient in the capacity for political organisation. These 
 formulas are still (as we have seen) as plentiful as blackberries, 
 in virtue of the ancient and apparently immortal fallacy of 
 explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. In physics, 
 ^ Politics, iv. (vii.), c. 6. 
 
78 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 the practice of ascribing the soporific effects of opium to a 
 " dormitive virtue " is no longer viewed with respect ; and the 
 pleasing formula that " nature abhors a vacuum " is not in our 
 day generally regarded as a useful truth ; but in politics these 
 methods still pass very well. So we have the success of Rome 
 set down by professed experts to an "innate capacity" in the 
 " Latin race " for so succeeding, and the contrasted disunity 
 of the Greek States to an "innate defect." The reader will 
 perhaps not be loth to follow a more slow-footed method of 
 explanation. 
 
 Taking the condition of the ancient peoples as Aristotle saw 
 it, we are led to infer, surely, that degree of organisation in any 
 population is determined by antecedent conditions, which may 
 be reduced to three general kinds : — 
 
 (i) Number and force of outside civilising influences — as in 
 Greece compared with Gaul or Egypt. 
 
 (2) Geographical conditions, as in Greece with its multitude 
 of valleys and general physical dividedness compared with Egypt. 
 
 (3) Balance of military strength in relation to neighbours or 
 enemies, as in medieval Ireland relatively to England or in the 
 sections of Gaul relatively to each other. 
 
 In terms of these conditions, it is easy to reach a rational view 
 of our problem. The different groups or stocks in Gaul, before 
 Cfesar, were normally in somewhat the same relation to each 
 other as the groups of Germany. Rome at the height of its 
 organised energy sent against them one of the greatest generals 
 of all history ; yet in the few years of the struggle with him, 
 they effected a series of combinations, and came very near crush- 
 ing him. So in Britain. It was as if Alexander the Great had 
 suddenly invaded Italy, and overrun it before the mutually 
 warring Italian peoples had time to develop a combination 
 against him. In civil as distinguished from military organisa- 
 tion, the Galli exhibited just the kind and degree of develop- 
 ment that normally goes with the standard of civilisation they 
 had reached. Their society was flawed by slavery, but not more 
 so than the Greek and the Roman. It exhibited already the 
 diseases invariably set up, thus far, in societies in which wealth 
 is accumulated and appropriated. 
 
 Among the Germani, on the other hand, we find exactly 
 corresponding defects. They were less civilised than the Galli, 
 more primitive, therefore less affected by the social vices accruing 
 to the accumulation of wealth ; but it was solely a question of 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 79 
 
 culture-stage. They were not better, wiser, more honourable. 
 The great virtue usually attributed to them, on the authority of 
 Caesar and Tacitus, is chastity : Tacitus laid stress on that because 
 it was lacking in the Rome of his day.^ But Rome had once 
 claimed for itself the same characteristic — when, like the 
 Germania of Tacitus, it was poor, primitive, warlike without 
 having attained extensive conquest. And it is abundantly 
 certain that as soon as the Germanic races came into changed 
 culture-conditions, in contact with the wealth and luxury of 
 the south, they developed the very grossest sensuality.- As 
 regards power of military organisation, again, we find them not 
 a whit before the Galli. Tacitus expressly singles out the Catti — 
 a tribe with a very Gaelic-looking name ^ — as being unusually 
 well-disciplined and intelligent for Germans, obeying their leaders, 
 attending to rules, calculating occasions, trusting to valour rather 
 than to luck, and more given to putting faith in their leader 
 than in their multitude. Whether these were Germans or not, 
 they seemed to Tacitus exceptional among the Germani, who, 
 he notes, usually lost days in the business of assembling for a 
 war, by reason of their straggling ways. As regards mode of 
 life, they were, like the ordinary run of barbarians, uncleanly ■* 
 
 ^ Later, we find Julian, in the Misopogon, praising the Gallic reverence for 
 chastity. See also Spartian, Niger, c. 6. The simple fact seems to be that 
 the early Germans laid stress on a late puberty, which was a climatic tendency. 
 Their general monogamy, it is suggested by Poesche, may have been a result 
 of the difficulty of feeding families in the north, after the period of primeval 
 promiscuity. Die Arier, S. 103. This theory is not inconsistent with the 
 fact that, once become monogamous, they multiplied rapidly. But cp. Hippo- 
 crates, De Aeribiis, c. 48, as to the Scythians, who were chaste and infecund. 
 
 ^ Even in Anglo-Saxondom, " polygamy was not unknown, and it was usual 
 for men to marry their father's widows." (Allen, Anglo-Saxon Britain, p. 74.) 
 
 ^ They were dwellers in the Hercynian forest, where they had been driven 
 by the Germanic Batavi. They wore beards, which was rare among the 
 Germani; and in other ways they were different from the bulk of the Germanic 
 tribes. "Duriora genti corpora, stricti artus, minax vultus, et major animi vigor. 
 Multum (ut inter Germanos) rationis ac soUertiae : praeponere electos, audire 
 praepositos, nosse ordines, intelligere occasiones, differe impetus, disponere 
 diem, vallare noctem, fortunam inter dubia, virtutem inter certa numerare ; 
 quodque rarissimum, nee nisi ratione disciplinae concessum, plus reponere in 
 duce quam in exercitu." {De mor. Germ. c. 30.) 
 
 ■* Tacitus, De mor. Germ, c, 20. The historian, however, makes the 
 curious statement (c. 22) that in the cold weather, which in Germany lasted 
 a long time, they rose late and began the day with a warm bath. This 
 clearly cannot have been true of the common people : it can have been true 
 only of part of the aristocracy, such as it was. It therefore ajjpears that much 
 
8o THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 and drunken, their passion for strong drink being such that 
 anyone could overcome them through it.^ Then in war, instead 
 of being, as our Teutonistic sentimentalists suppose, remarkably- 
 frank and chivalrous, they usually figure as gaining advantages 
 by craft and stratagem. Thus Ariovistus conquered the Belgae 
 of his region by taking them at unawares : ^ the Tenchtheri and 
 the Usipetes had similarly overpowered the Gallic tribes who 
 at first beat them off, by returning unexpectedly.^ One Roman 
 historian, who had been among them, went so far as to call 
 them a race of born liars. •♦ Withal, the Germani seemed to have 
 been, like the traditional Galli, much given to boasting.* The 
 Tenchtheri and Usipetes, who had been driven from their own 
 land by the Germanic Suevi, intimated to Caesar that though 
 they had been beaten by the Suevi, against whom the Gods 
 themselves could not stand, they were capable of beating any- 
 body else in the world.^ Caesar however destroyed them as 
 utterly as he did Ariovistus. 
 
 These qualities, be it observed, are not to be reckoned as 
 specially Germanic, any more than the shortcomings of the 
 Galli or Britons are to be counted specially Gallic. We are not 
 to invert the fallacy of the Celtophobes, but simply to decide 
 that the Germani exhibited the characteristics of barbarians at 
 a given culture-stage. Trickery and boasting are absolutely 
 normal characteristics of savage tribes in warfare in all ages. 
 Only it is necessary to show, as against the Teutophiles, that 
 the ancient German was a barbarian like another. If there is 
 
 of what Tacitus tells of the Germani, like what Ccesar tells of the Galli, 
 represents only what would be communicated by the upper classes. 
 
 1 C. 23. 
 
 2 Ccesar, De Bella Gallico, i. 40. 
 
 3 " Natum mendacio genus" (Velleius Paterculus, ii. 118). Cp. Cajsar, 
 B.G. iv. 13. Mr Kingsley in his unlucky lectures on The Jioinan and the 
 Teuton (ed. 1889, p. 11) makes the extraordinary statement that " the Teuton 
 thought it mean to use surprises and stratagems." The familiar narrative 
 of CKsar might have withheld him from such extremity of error. Ic is clear 
 from Velleius Paterculus that the destruction of Varus was entirely a work of 
 stratagem and surprise, the Roman meeting his doom because he would not 
 believe that the people he was ruling justly and considerately would plot 
 against him. Of the later Goths, Mr Bradley notes {The Goths, p. 11) that 
 "the one great reproach which the Roman writers bring against them is that 
 of faithlessness to their treaties." 
 
 * " Ariovistus ad postulata Caisaris pauca respondit : de suis virtutibus 
 multa prcedicavit " {De Bella Gallico, i. 44). 
 •-' /(/., iv. 7. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 8 1 
 
 any political difference between him and the Gaul, in the period 
 before the Frankish invasion, it is that he submitted with greater 
 docility to the Roman rule when once conquered. As against 
 the modern German lucubrations on the subject of the early 
 defeat of Yarns by Arminius, we have the record in the Augustan 
 history that poor Alexander Severus, setting out to deal with a 
 German attack on Gaul, was troubled by this insubordination in 
 a race which had usually been submissive even to the weakest 
 emperors.^ The Gauls, on the other hand, are described in 
 the same connection as "dour" and fractious." The Gaul, it 
 appears, having a clearer national memory and a more developed 
 political consciousness, was sensitive where the Teuton, in his 
 earlier culture-stage, was passive. Yet it has been pretended 
 that the Teuton had the greater resisting power because of a 
 greater gift for organisation and union. As a matter of fact, 
 troops of Teutons long served in the Roman army, enabling it 
 to keep the others in subjection. 
 
 There remain to be considered two phenomena which some 
 students have singled out as marking an important difference 
 of individuality between the ancient Teuton and the ancient 
 Celt, commonly so-called. They are : (i) the phenomenon of 
 the influence of women in the German affairs, and (2) the 
 phenomenon of the voluntary adhesion of German warriors, as 
 sworn companions, to a chief on the strength of his character 
 or fame, without regard to family connection. The latter 
 circumstance has been cited by students who hold that the clan, 
 the primitive organisation on the basis of the family, real and 
 theoretical, is a low form of society, and that any voluntary com- 
 bination is a higher form. Now, it so happens that this very 
 species of organisation existed in full force among the Iberian- 
 looking Aquitanians, who are held by some to have been the 
 pre-Celtic stock of France, who were certainly dark and southern- 
 looking, and whose type is supposed, by those who disparage the 
 " Celtic " faculty of organisation, to predominate in France to- 
 day. Not only did the Aquitanians of Caesar's day often elect 
 their generals,^ but their chiefs were followed by bands of sworn 
 
 ' " Natio .... quae semper etiam minusculis imperaloribus subjecta 
 videbalur." (Lampridius, Pit. Aiex. Seven, c. 59.) 
 
 - " Gallicana; mentes, ut sese habent, durre ac retoiridix; et saepe impera- 
 toribus graves." Tacitus, again, notes that the Britons would pay tribute 
 quietly if no violence were done them, but that against violence they always 
 revolted {Vita Agricolae, 13, 19). 
 
 •* See Ccesar, B.G., iii. 8 ; vii. 4, as to choice of leaders generally. 
 
 V 
 
82 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 companions,^ who shared all his fortunes and died with him to 
 the last man when the fortune of war destroyed him. Here 
 then was the institution supposed to distinguish the Teutons, 
 and to show their superiority to the primitive instinct of clandom, 
 found in high development in the stock to which, with that of 
 the Liguri, we must look for the non-Teutonic basis of the 
 (Gallic population if we decide that the blond Galli were Teutons. 
 And the blond Galli, be it observed, lacked the institution ; not 
 that they were limited to the primitive organisation of the clan, 
 for they clearly were not ; but that they do not seem to have 
 had soldures on the Iberian system. On the other hand, it is 
 very evident that the life of the Germani was very largely based 
 on the primitive clan principle. Tacitus records that it was held 
 among them a duty to espouse alike the amities and the enmities 
 of the group or the community,- though these vendettas were 
 not implacable ; and he even holds that their successes in war 
 were largely due to the fact that they fought in groups of 
 kindred ; ^ going on to say that the voices of their women and 
 children near them roused them to their best efforts — a statement 
 which reads strangely beside the story of Csesar's rout of the 
 Tenchtheri and Usipetes, when the cruel attack on the camp 
 of the women and children struck the men with panic and put 
 them to flight. However that might be, we know that many of 
 the Teutons who invaded England after the decay of the Roman 
 empire settled in groups of one family name — that is to say, 
 in clans. The place-name-types of Nottingham, Billingham, 
 Birmingham, Harlington, Darlington, Uppington, and so on, so 
 abundant in the midland counties point to this : these towns 
 were the "home of the Nottings," "home of the Billings," 
 " town of the Harlings," and so forth. And that the very simple 
 faculty of combining on a larger scale on the clan basis was not 
 at all lacking in any of the so-called Celtic peoples is shown by 
 the organisation of the Irish in the tenth century. The fact that 
 the Highlanders of Scotland (including the " Germanic " Cale- 
 donians of Tacitus and the Norse immigrant element of the 
 Middle Ages) remained under a pretty strict clan system down 
 till last century, is for thoughtful readers only one more proof of 
 
 ^ " Devoti quos illi soldurios appellant." Cresar, B.G., iii. 22. 
 
 - "Suscipere tarn inimicitias seu patris seu propinqui quam amicitias necesse 
 est : nee implacabilis durant." De t>ior. Ger»i. c. 21. 
 
 ■' " Quodque prsecipuuni fortitudinis incitamentum est, non casus, nee 
 forluita conglobatio turmam aut cuneum facit, sed familise et propinquitates. " 
 Id., c. 7. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 83 
 
 the divisive influence of a physically divided territory when the 
 means of communication remain primitive. The Highlanders 
 remained clannish as the civilised Greeks remained clannish. 
 But even the Highlanders were well unified under the Celtic 
 kings at the date of the Conquest ; and the Highland and Low- 
 land populations seem to have been well unified at the time of 
 the intervention of the English king, Edward I., whereafter the 
 Lowland element, represented by the Norman Bruce and his 
 Stewart descendants, predominated, and the progress of the 
 Highlanders in civilisation was disastrously arrested. 
 
 On the other point of the influence of the women in the 
 counsels of the community, the claim for the Teutons is found to 
 be no less completely quashed by the facts. It is one of the 
 queerest ironies of the doctrine we are examining that the respect 
 alleged to be anciently paid by the Teutons to their women is 
 cited as a proof of their peculiar merit and sociability, when in 
 point of fact there is to-day no country in civilised Europe where 
 women's opinions are less respected.^ This is too notorious to 
 need proving ; yet, while the average German loudly applauds 
 Prince Bismarck's furious opposition to the intervention of women 
 in politics, the ancient privileges of the women of his race in 
 that direction are counted to it for a merit. Turning once more 
 dispassionately to the documents, we find that just as the dark 
 Aquitanians possessed the institution of the devoti, supposed to 
 be so specially Teutonic, so did the dark Liguri — who, as we 
 said, seem with the Aquitani to be among the oldest and the most 
 persistent elements in the Gallic compound — treat their women 
 with that consideration which is supposed to have been peculiar 
 to the ancient Germani. Plutarch tells us that, the Ligurian 
 women having once intervened in a civil war so successfully as to 
 restore peace not only in the cities but in the families, there arose 
 the custom of calling them into consultation in all questions of 
 peace and war, and of submitting to their notice all disputes with 
 allies.- Whatever that story may be historically worth, the 
 testimony is of equal validity with that of Tacitus concerning the 
 status of the German women. Tacitus tells that in memory of an 
 
 ^ Dr Bodichon {Etudes sur rAlgi!rie) specified a "political influence ac- 
 corded to women" as common to the Celtic a;/(/ Teutonic peoples of his blond 
 group, along with "predominance of the aristocratic element." This just 
 before the era of Bismarck, and within a generation of the Commune. 
 
 - Plutarch, De iiiulhriiiii virtittibits, c. 6. Plutarch speaks only of A'clioi, 
 but as he connects those in question with the campaign of Hannibal, they were 
 presumably the Ligurians. 
 
84 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 occasion on which ranks giving way in battle were restored by the 
 exhortations of the women, the sex was held in a sort of sanctity, 
 was admitted into the counsels, and was listened to as having 
 oracular power.^ There is no other evidence on the subject ; 
 and even this compares curiously with another passage found in 
 the same treatise, where a Teutonic or Scandinavian tribe is 
 described as being peculiarly degraded, in that it is governed by 
 a woman. ^ In any case, there was clearly nothing specially 
 Teutonic in the matter. 
 
 When we finally contrast broadly the histories of the countries 
 in which Teutons are held to predominate with those of the 
 countries in which Celts are held to predominate, pre-Norman 
 England with early Ireland, Roman and pre-Roman Gaul with 
 Frankish Gaul, later Germany with post-Carlovingian France, any 
 remaining superstition we may cherish as to a unique Teutonic 
 faculty for order must be cast away. The strict truth is that 
 wherever, between the decline of Rome and the Middle Ages, the 
 Germani by force of numbers and in virtue of their barbaric 
 militarism overran the more civilised peoples, they exhibited 
 during whole ages an utter incapacity for coherence and peaceful 
 order. " Show me," says Zeller, discussing five hundred years 
 of their history, "Show me anything, up to the eighth century, 
 save crude beginnings of government, as soon overthrown as 
 raised."^ And there is no answering the challenge. The 
 anarchism of the Goths who invaded Italy was the despair of 
 their leaders. Athaulf, the successor of Alaric, avowed that 
 whereas his first ambition had been to destroy the Roman name, 
 and to make of the Roman empire a Gothic one, in which he 
 should rule as did Augustus, he at length realised that the Goths 
 were too inveterately barbarous to submit to laws, and decided 
 rather to use their energies to re-establish and extend the Roman 
 power, reforming the old empire rather than seeking to found 
 another.* Whatever efforts at organisation were made by the 
 Teutonic leaders were inspired by the memory of the Roman 
 example, and were made with the help of Italians trained in the 
 Roman tradition. Theodoric, the greatest of them all, wrought 
 
 ^ Dc uior. Germ. c. 8. 
 
 2 It is of the Sitones, who "continue" the Suiones, that he writes: — 
 " Cetera similes, uno differunt, quod femina dominatur : in tantum non modo 
 a libertate sed etiam a servitute degenerant " (c. 45). The concluding words, 
 " Hie Sueviae finis," give an air of interpolation to this part of the book. 
 
 ^ His/oire d'Al/eviagite, ii., avant-propos, p. x. 
 
 •* Paulus Orosius, Hist. vii. 43. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 85 
 
 thus ; and yet he failed in his ultimate aims, because he had to 
 deal with populations barbarically averse to organisation. The 
 very movement of the Teutonic peoples into Gaul and Italy, 
 indeed, was itself largely produced by their terror of the Huns, 
 against whom they could not stand, and before whom they fled. 
 And they transiently succeeded rather through the military 
 weakness of the western populations than through any political 
 or military genius of their own. Their descendants were easily 
 overthrown in their turn by new invaders, more freshly barbaric. 
 Suevi fell before Visigoths, Visigoths before Ostrogoths, Ostro- 
 goths before Lombards, Lombards and Burgundians before 
 Gallicised Franks, Ripuarian Franks before miscellaneous 
 Teutons, Visigoths and Vandals before Saracens. Wherever they 
 took on civilisation, it was at best a partial adoption of that set 
 up by Rome : in no case did they carry it further : in most cases 
 they lowered it. The Merovingian rule in France exhibits every 
 evil feature that has ever been charged against either Gauls or 
 Latins in the mass, — brutish vice, revolting ferocity, habitual 
 duplicity, pitiable weakness of character.^ With characteristic 
 logic, the Teutophile commentators charge the corruption of the 
 Franks to the Gallic civilisation in which they grow corrupt, as 
 if there were any merit in having been barbarically simple where 
 nothing but barbaric simplicity existed, and as if to become worse 
 than the Galli were not to give a proof of mental inferiority to the 
 Galli. However that might be, their history is one of chronic 
 strife down to Charlemagne, and of speedy relapse into similar strife 
 after Charlemagne. There is no people in European history 
 which for a longer period exhibited a more inveterate spirit of 
 
 dissension than the German. 
 
 If we simply take the history of Anglo-Saxon England, as 
 the best counter-picture to that of Celtic Ireland, we have a 
 record of just such internecine war and anarchy as English 
 politicians are wont to point-to, in the case of Ireland, as a 
 proof of the innate unruliness of the Celt. In the pages of a 
 historian not at all disposed to darken his colours on that 
 theme, the story of Saxon England becomes a miserable record 
 of the ups and downs of battling semi-savages, falling out afresh 
 in every generation, and apparently as incapable of political 
 cohesion as their ancestors of the days of Aristotle. Landing 
 
 ^ St Boniface (Anglo-Saxon) wlio was the great missionary among the 
 Germans in the 8th century, before Charlemagne subdued the Saxons, speaks 
 of them in general as dull and fleshly: " carnales homines et idiotx Allemanni, 
 Bajuvarii, vel Franci." (Othlon, Vila S. Bonifacii, ii. § I, cited byMignet). 
 
86 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 in the middle of the fifth century, the first historic invaders 
 conquered but a part of the island ; being resisted by the 
 Britons with a stubborn endurance which the later Saxons never 
 showed against their own invaders. Not for two hundred years 
 was England substantially Anglicised ; and this because, facing 
 tenacious enemies, the invaders could not attain to political unity. 
 They were at war among themselves immediately ; and every page 
 bears record of fresh strife through the vast space of six hundred 
 years — a lapse of time, be it observed, much greater than has 
 been held to prove certain modern barbarians incapable of 
 civilisation. The record becomes drearily monotonous. "Revolt 
 and slaughter had fatally broken the power of the West-Saxons 
 when the Northumbrians attacked them." " Penda allied him- 
 self with the Welsh king, Cadwallan, in an attack on Eadwine." 
 Pagan Penda conquers Christian East-Anglia, also Northumbria. 
 " Even while Caedmon was singing, the Christian Church of 
 Northumberland was torn in two by strife." " London fell into 
 Mercian hands. The West-Saxons, who had been long ago 
 stripped of their conquests along the Severn by Penda, were 
 driven across the Thames by Wulfhere." "But the vigorous 
 and warlike Ecgfrith was a different foe from the West-Saxon 
 or the Jute," and Mercia is again overthrown by Northumbria. 
 In turn " the supremacy of Northumbria fell for ever with the 
 death of Ecgfrith and the defeat of Nechtansmere " at the hands 
 of the Scottish Celts, Mercia making war afresh. In the south- 
 west, " able as Ini was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to 
 hush the civil strife that was the curse of Wessex. . . . In 726 
 Ini laid down his crown and sought peace and death in a 
 pilgrimage to Rome." " The anarchy which had driven Ini 
 from the throne broke out on his departure in civil strife which 
 left Wessex an easy prey to the successor of Ceolred." Aethel- 
 bald aims at the headship of Britain, "but the arm of Aethelbald 
 was destined to the same failure as that of his predecessors." 
 " England north of the Humber was saved from his grasp." 
 " Southern England was wrested from Mercia." " From the 
 death of Baeda the history of Northumbria is in fact only a wild 
 story of lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was swept 
 away by treason and revolt . . . the very fields lay waste. . . . 
 An anarchy almost as complete had fallen on Wessex after the 
 repulse of Aethelbald's invasion. Only in Mercia was there any 
 sign of order and settled rule." Later, " Mercia was torn by 
 a civil war which broke out on Cenwulf's death." "All England 
 south of the Thames at once submitted to Ecgberht of Essex ; 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 8/ 
 
 and East Anglia rose in a desperate revolt which proved fatal 
 to its Mercian rulers." " Mercia bowed to the West-Saxon over- 
 lordship." And so on till the Danes came and " struck down 
 the short-lived greatness of Wessex." At their landing "civil 
 strife, as usual, distracted the energies of Northumbria." For 
 a hundred and fifty more years the fresh Teutonic element swells 
 the old imbroglio, till in the eleventh century the Danish Cnut 
 crushes the whole chaos into submission. And thus it comes 
 that, six hundred years after the first Saxon invasion, after Cnut 
 has been followed by Edward the Confessor, we find England 
 under Harold still chronically in civil war, ready for the Norman 
 Conquest, still uncivilised, unprogressive, undistinguished. 
 Sparks of culture had gleamed at intervals, only to die out. 
 " Literature, which on the Continent was kindling into a new 
 activity, died down in England into a few psalters and homilies. 
 . . . National history there was none. . . . The Church sank 
 into lethargy. . . . Abroad, Europe was waking to a new revival of 
 literature, but England was all but severed from the Continent." ^ 
 After this, who shall speak to us of the Teutonic gift for civilisa- 
 tion and orderly progress ? The historian whom we have just 
 been following avows that it was the two hundred years of 
 Danish, Norman, and Angevin domination that made " not 
 merely English wealth and English freedom, but England itself.""^ 
 The Saxons, who never could comprehensively dominate the 
 British, and never could unite against the invader ^ were them- 
 selves swiftly subjected in mass by Dane and Norman in succes- 
 sion. Again we seem thrown on speculation as to race qualities 
 for a formula ; but by this time we are perhaps capable of turn- 
 ing our backs on that method, and finding our formula in the 
 principle that organisation and civilisation are products not of 
 " race " but of the conditions in which races live. The Danish 
 dominion could not have brought permanent order, much less 
 civilisation. Cnut held the land in virtue of energy of will and 
 military power ; Duke William in turn held it by the same 
 qualities, and unwittingly brought with him the seeds of a real 
 civilisation in virtue of his contact with France, which in turn 
 
 ^ Green's Short History of England, p. 66. 
 
 2 Id., p. 6o. 
 
 *"Even yet [after the battle of Hastings] the English could not agree 
 among themselves. In this crisis of the national fate, the local jealousies 
 burnt up as fiercely as ever. While William was marching upon London, the 
 witan were quarrelling and intriguing in the city over the succession" (Allen, 
 Anglo-Saxon Britain, p. 171). 
 
L 
 
 88 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 was in contact with Southern Europe. All modern European 
 civilisation is but the rebirth and development of germs left by 
 the civilisations of the past, which in turn had been gradually 
 developed from crude germs that took gradual life in peculiar 
 physical and social conditions. The new civilisations are greater 
 than the old, as wheat grown in certain new soils bears more 
 richly than it does in old ; but the new civilisation could no 
 more have been developed by the mere hereditary character of 
 the races who carry it on than the wheat could be spontaneously 
 generated by the soil. We must reject alike all theories which 
 set down to any race whatever, qiia race, the faculty of making 
 civilisation. Some French historians, writing in exactly the style 
 of the Teutophiles, ascribe to the Celticity of the Celt the sur- 
 vival of civilisation in Gaul. The Teutonic invasion, says one, 
 " could not enfeeble the genius of the Celtic race. It was that 
 which absorbed the barbarians as it had appropriated the Roman 
 civilisation ; it converted them ; it infused into them its ideas 
 and made of them, for the salvation of Europe, the apostles of 
 the Gospel and the champions of civilisation." ^ Thus does 
 rhetoric meet rhetoric. It would indeed be reasonable to say 
 that if the new Prankish empire, under Charlemagne, was able in 
 part to achieve the civilisation and organisation of Middle Europe, 
 it was in virtue of the elements of civilisation and order persisting 
 in Roman Gaul. The difference in civilisation and intelligence 
 between the Gallicised Franks and the Saxons was a difference 
 due to the Gallic blending and the Gallic environment. It is 
 also true that the stand made in England by Alfred against the 
 Danes, one of the first bright points in " English " history, 
 represents the result of a union of the Celtic and the Saxon 
 population of Wessex.- But it is as idle to ascribe that difference 
 to the " genius of the Celtic race " as it is to credit later German 
 civilisation to the genius of the Teutonic race, or as it would be 
 to credit the special results of ploughing and draining a field to 
 the "genius of the soil." The Galli were further advanced in 
 the way of civilisation than the Germani : that is all. They had 
 a richer territory — a soil richer alike in mines and in agricultural 
 products, and so they had reached in parts a commercial and 
 capitalistic civilisation before the coming of C?esar, who was on 
 that account able the more easily to organise his conquest. The 
 Teutons who later entered Gaul and Italy seem to have morally 
 degenerated instead of progressing, simply because they were in 
 
 ' Histoirc de P Europe, de 395 d 1270, par H. Chevallier, 1S80, p. 15. 
 - Grant Allen, Anglo-Saxoti Britain, p. 140. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 89 
 
 the main heavy-witted barbarians suddenly plunged in material 
 well-being without having undergone any due psychological and 
 intellectual preparation. Something of the same kind goes on 
 even to-day in the United States, among the much more quick- 
 witted and civilised Irish. For civilisation is no sudden angel of 
 change, no tropic rain falling on a germ-filled soil to cover it in 
 a day with a wealth of beauty and joy, but a slow and precarious 
 transmutation of mind and life by a play of direct and indirect 
 forces, which at times visibly frustrate each other, and seem to 
 turn all energy to an evil end. 
 
 So it was in the building-up of the civilisation of England. 
 The mere political unification of the country by brute force at 
 the Conquest meant no conscious harmonisation of life. Brute 
 force always incurs brute penalties. The mailed Norman no more 
 than the mailed Dane brought with him a talisman of " genius of 
 race " wherewith to charm the warring egoisms of men into synergy 
 and peace. The sympathetic historian whom we have followed 
 above, with his passion for telescoping periods, tells us ^ in one 
 place that it was in her " years of slavery " under " foreign 
 masters " that England " really became the England that we know," 
 as if self-governing industrial England dated from the thirteenth 
 or fourteenth century. He tells us that between the Conquest 
 and Edward the First, through contact with the Continent, " the 
 old mental stagnation was at once broken up, and art and litera- 
 ture covered England with great buildings and busy schools." 
 But, to say nothing of the twenty years of bloody anarchy under 
 Stephen, there was civil war under John, civil war under Henry 
 the Third, gain and loss of Scotland under the first two Edwards, 
 civil war under Edward H., and, after the palmy days of Edward 
 ni., a long decadence and retrogression : — 
 
 " The hundred years which follow the brief sunshine of Cressy and 
 the ' Canterbury Tales' are years of the deepest gloom : no age of our 
 history is so sad and sombre as the age which we traverse from the 
 third Edward to Joan of Arc. The throb of hope and glory which 
 pulsed at its outset through every class of English society died into 
 inaction and despair. Material life lingered-on indeed, commerce 
 still widened, but its progress was dissociated from all the nobler 
 elements of national well-being. The towns sank again into close 
 oligarchies, the bondsmen struggling forward to freedom fell back 
 into a serfage which still leaves its trace on the soil. Literature 
 reached its lowest ebb. The religious revival of the Lollard was 
 
 ^ SAori History, p. 60. 
 
90 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 trodden out in blood, while the Church shrivelled into a self-seeking 
 secular priesthood. In the clash of civil strife political freedom was 
 all but extinguished, and the age which began with the Good Parlia- 
 ment ended with the despotism of the Tudors."^ 
 
 In the previous period of expansion, be it observed, every 
 determining element of advance was foreign. The " Teutonic " 
 genius is nowhere to be seen. The Anglo-Norman civilisation 
 began with the influx of French craftsmen, clerks, and artists. 
 The first stirring of the new society by the spirit of imaginative 
 literature, under Henry the First, came from the inspiration of 
 the Welsh Arthurian legend ; the first secular-minded and critical 
 men of letters are the " Celtic " Walter de Map and Gerald de 
 Barri, both of Welsh blood, both educated at Paris, both writing 
 in Latin.- The very winning of the Charter depended on the 
 situation abroad, the defeat of John's forces (Flemish, German, 
 and English) at Bouvines by the French under Philip^ being 
 the means of enabling the English barons to hold out ; and 
 they had finally to seek aid from the French king against 
 the French mercenaries with whom John would have over- 
 whelmed them. And the historic creation of the English 
 Parliament, still later, is credited to the Frenchman, Simon de 
 Montfort, against whose marriage with the sister of Henry the 
 Third the English baronage at first revolted. As for literature, 
 the fructification of Chaucer's gift by foreign contact is as certain 
 as the felicity of the developed gift itself. The whole course of 
 English history as of every other, in fact, in so far as it is a 
 history of progress at all, is but a record of gain from changed 
 conditions and from the cross-fertilisation of cultures, of civilisa- 
 tions. The rise of modern English literature under Elizabeth is 
 emphatically such a process. Even that side of the literature 
 which might be supposed most strictly derived from the Saxon 
 stock, the Folk Lore, as set forth for instance in the plays of 
 Shakspere, is found to have been very largely if not predomi- 
 nantly Celtic in character.* Thus many of the "household 
 
 ^ S/ior( History, pp. 216-217. 
 
 - /(/., pp. 115-117. "Gerald is the father of our popular literature," says 
 Green, who makes him a mixture of " the restless Celtic fire" and " Norman 
 daring ;" while Walter de Map, the poet, is credited with "Celtic vivacity" 
 only. 
 
 ^ "It is to the victory of Bouvines that England owes her Great Charter" 
 (Green, as cited, p. 122). 
 
 ''See Thom's Three Notelets on Shakspere, pp. 27-39, 73-74. 105-108. 
 Mr Thom notes the peculiar wealth of fairy-lore in Shakspere and Drayton, 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 9 1 
 
 words " of English fancy are due to non-English survivals. And 
 still, with literature and Christian theology in full play, the "rac£i'_ 
 exhibits no innate genius for political harmony : civil war breaks 
 out anew on new pretexts ; a new polity is forcibly founded only 
 to fall again ; and ever since, English political progress has been 
 made by way of the strife of parties. There is indeed no other 
 way. 
 
 Nor does the later history of Germany exhibit any better for- 
 tune, any greater gift of union and peaceful organisation among 
 the nominal descendants of the older Teutonic stock. What- 
 ever progress took place among the German-speaking populations 
 was, as has been said, a progress imposed from the outside. The 
 Teutons of Central Europe emerge in modern history without 
 a literature,^ at a time when the cooped-up Welsh seem to have 
 had a whole library of poetry and legend, and when even remote 
 Iceland (where also perchance, despite assumptions to the con- 
 trary, there had been a blending of races) has a poetico-historic 
 lore ; and their literary beginnings are for the most part simple 
 imitations from the more civilised neighbouring peoples. In 
 their political development, from the tenth century onwards, after 
 the separation of the German and Frankish sections of the 
 Carlovingian empire, we see only the struggle of forces character- 
 istic of all feudaHsm, emperors fighting with dukes, sparring with 
 the Pope, balancing fief against fief, pitting bishops against 
 nobles. The organisation of imperial Rome was set up, plus 
 feudalism and Christian ecclesiasticism, without even the measure 
 of peace normally enforced by Rome ; the new chicane of church- 
 man and lawyer being but a new fountain of strife. Towns, 
 castles, palaces, abbeys, churches, were one and all fortified places, 
 ready for war at any moment ; and every new reign seems to 
 have been a pretext for anarchy, till it should appear whether or 
 not the new emperor could maintain his power. The better the 
 emperors established themselves in Italy, the greater the scope 
 for anarchy at home ; and the chief significance of the Teutonic 
 rule for mediaeval Italy was to make the German cries of Guelf 
 and Ghibeline the symbols of never-ending ferocious strife and 
 an infinity of crime. Pope and anti-pope. Kaiser and anti-Kaiser, 
 
 both of Warwickshire, near Wales. I may here note my dissent from the 
 judgment of Mr Grant Allen, that English remains "essentially identical in 
 grammar and idiom with the language of the first Teutonic settlers" (as cited, 
 p. 230). The alteration of English syntax is as marked as the alteration of 
 vocabulary, and for every language-learner it is nearer French than German. 
 ' The supposititious ancient mythic poetry having been lost. 
 
92 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 recall the worst days of declining Rome. And when after three 
 hundred years of chronic battle we reach the outstanding reign 
 of Frederick the Second, it is to find him employing an army of 
 Saracens against Italian free cities and the Pope, battling all his 
 life long with the church and with his nominal subjects ; and 
 dying beaten, to leave Germany once more to anarchy. 
 
 All this while the spirit of self-government, in the fuller sense 
 of the term, had been manifesting itself, not in the German- 
 speaking peoples, but in the cities of France, northern and 
 southern alike, in respect of the new phenomenon of communes, 
 claiming and holding defined rights as against the nobles who 
 formerly ruled the towns as their domains. Whether or not this 
 development in the north had any derivation from older Teutonic 
 guilds, and in the south from the Roman curia^ the institution 
 radiated from France in the twelfth century to England, Germany 
 and Italy alike. In France it was, too, that the spirit of culture 
 became organised in the same period in the University of Paris. 
 From the same centre, it may be, spread influences of a less 
 civilising kind, as the institution of chivalry so-called ; and 
 indeed France may be said to have organised tyranny earlier 
 than her northern rivals. We are not concerned here, however, 
 to make out any thesis for any one people as a civilising force ; 
 but simply to maintain that every people in turn counts for 
 civilisation in the measure in which its conditions make for 
 progress of any kind ; and that neither in the moral nor in the 
 aesthetic arts is there any racial bias or disability, though there is 
 precedence and sequence. 
 
 We have already glanced at the Teutonic theory, as developed 
 by Dr Taylor, that there is something in the " inner genius " of 
 the Teutonic race which has drawn it to Protestantism and anti- 
 sacerdotalism, while the Celts, or the " brachycephalic race " in 
 general, take as naturally to Catholicism and priestly rule. In 
 one breath accused of incapacity for organisation, the " Celt " is 
 described in the next as unduly prone to religious organisation 
 
 ^ This theory, set forth by Augustin Thierry, is now rejected. See in the 
 Histoire GtUtdrale edited by MM. Rambaud and Lavisse (Vol. H.) the 
 chapter (viii.) by MM. Giry and A. Reville, § 2, La Rdvohition connmtnale, 
 p. 418. Cp. Seignobos, Hist, de la Civ. ati Moyen Age, p. 81, and Che- 
 vallier, as cited, p. 484. But compare the view of Dr Brentano as to the 
 origin of the early English guilds in family groups holding trade secrets, and 
 the suggestion of Mr Grant Allen that the first families of craftsmen in England 
 may have been Romanised Welsh inhabitants of the cities — whose municipal 
 life seems to have been carried on without interruption from Roman times. 
 {Angio-Saxon Britain, p. 161. C/. Scarth, Ko)nan Britain, pp. 227-230.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 93 
 
 and subordination — to being in religion exactly what modern 
 Germans are in politics. It may be well to deal at some little 
 length with that phase of the discussion ; and again Dr Taylor's 
 summary will conveniently serve as a statement of the theory to 
 be dealt with. 
 
 "Now that Christianity has spread over Europe, it is divided into 
 two opposed camps — the Catholic and the Protestant, the Church of 
 Authority and the Church of Reason (!), the line of division coinciding 
 very closely with the line which separates the two great races of Aryan 
 speech. The dolichocephalic Teutonic race is Protestant ; the brachy- y 
 cephalic Celto-Slavic race is either Roman Catholic or Greek Ortho- 
 dox. In the first, individualism, wilfulness, self-reliance, independence, 
 are strongly developed : the second is submissive to authority and 
 conservative in instincts. To the Teutonic races Latin Christianity 
 was never congenial, and they have now converted it into something 
 very different from what it was at first, or from what it became in the 
 hands of Latin and Greek doctors. The Teutonic peoples are averse 
 to sacerdotalism, and have shaken off priestly guidance and developed 
 individualism. Protestantism was a revolt against a religion imposed 
 by the South upon the North, but which had nev^er been congenial to 
 the Northern mind. The German princes, who were of purer 
 Teutonic blood than their subjects, were the leaders of the ecclesi- 
 astical revolt. Scandinavia is more purely Teutonic than Germany ; 
 and Scandinavia is Protestant to the backbone. The Lowland Scotch, 
 who are more purely Teutonic than the English, have given the freest 
 development to the genius of Protestantism. Those Scotch clans 
 which have clung to the old faith have the smallest admixture of 
 Teutonic blood. Ulster, the most Teutonic province of Ireland, is the 
 most firmly Protestant. The case of the Belgians and the Dutch is 
 very striking. The line of religious division became the line of 
 political separation, and is co-terminous with the two racial provinces. 
 The mean cephalic index of the Dutch is 75'3, which is nearly that of 
 the Swedes and the North Germans ; the mean index of the Belgians 
 is 79, which is that of the Parisians. The Burgundian Cantons of 
 Switzerland, which possess the largest proportion of Teutonic blood, 
 are Protestant, while the brachycephalic Cantons in the East and 
 South are the stronghold of Catholicism. South Germany, which is 
 brachycephalic, is Catholic ; North Germany, which is dolichocephalic, 
 is Protestant. Hanover, which is Protestant, has a considerably lower 
 index than Cologne, which is Catholic. The Thirty Years' War was 
 a war of race as well as of religion ; and the peace of Westphalia 
 drew the line of religious demarcation with tolerable precision along 
 the ethnic frontier. 
 
 " Wherever the Teutonic blood is purest — in North Germany, 
 
94 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Ulster, the Orkneys, the Lothians, 
 Yorkshire,! East Anglia — Protestantism found easy entrance, and 
 has retained its hold, often in some exaggerated form. In Bohemia, 
 trance, Belgium, Alsace, it has been trodden out. In Galway and 
 Kerry it has no footing. The Welsh and the Cornishmen, wlio became 
 Protestants by political accident, have transformed Protestantism into 
 an emotional religion, which has inner affinities with the emotiottal 
 faith of Ireland and Italy. Even now Protestantism gains no con- 
 verts in the South of Europe, or Catholicism in the North. Roman 
 Catholicism, or the cognate creed of the Greek and Russian orthodox 
 churches, is dominant in all those lands where the brachycephalic 
 race prevails ; Protestantism is confined to the dolichocephalic 
 Teutonic region. The neighbourhood of Toulouse, which was the 
 headquarters of the Albigenses, is more dolichocephalic than any 
 other part of Southern France, and Toulouse was the Visigothic 
 capital. In no city of France were the Huguenots so numerous as 
 at Nimes, another stronghold of the Visigoths ; and Nimes is still 
 largely Protestant in creed. England, which is orthocephalic, is 
 neither Catholic nor Protestant, but Anglican. It is not to be 
 supposed, however, the religious belief is a function of the shape of 
 the skull, but that the shape of the skull is one of the surest indica- 
 tions of race."- 
 
 Why the last sentence should be added to such an exposition 
 it is not easy to understand, for if the preceding extract means 
 anything it means that form of skull in general determines form 
 of ecclesiastical preference and of religious belief. We can only 
 deal with the exposition on its merits. It will be noted that 
 where the " broad-headed " peoples are found to be Protestant, 
 as in Wales and Cornwall, the Teutonic theorists assert "political 
 accident " and impute mysticity or " emotion," without asking for 
 a moment whether " political accident " so-called may not have 
 determined equally the Catholicism of Ireland and the Pro- 
 testantism of North Germany, Scotland, England, and Scandi- 
 navia. Such a question, and a further question as to the alleged 
 religious affinity between Welsh Methodism and Irish Catholic- 
 ism, will be found to be fatal to the whole thesis. 
 
 I. It was emphatically "political accident" that set up 
 Protestantism in England and Scotland while Ireland was forced 
 further into Catholicism. The Reformation was made in England 
 by a king of French and Welsh descent, acting in concurrence 
 
 1 [One of the parts of England where there certainly survived a large part of 
 the pre-Saxon population. J. M. R.] 
 
 2 Origin of the Aryatis, pp. 247-249. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 95 
 
 with a large body of the lower aristocracy, who went with him 
 because they were offered a large share of the spoils ; and in 
 Scotland the greed of the landowners wrought the same result in 
 opposition to the throne. It was for the same reason, and not 
 through any special narrow-headedness, that the German princes 
 promoted the Reformation.^ For the rest, the sphere of the 
 Reformation was largely fixed in respect of simple remoteness 
 from Roman influence ; and it was much more a political (and 
 financial) resentment of Italian interference than any theory of 
 anti-sacerdotalism that spread Protestantism in the northern 
 countries. 
 
 2. The Catholic religion had been as "congenial to the 
 North" as to the South for some eight hundred years ; and one 
 of the elements of the Reformation movement was the conviction 
 in the North that the Italian priesthood was in large part tin- 
 believing. 
 
 3. Luther, as JDr Taylor elsezvhere notes, 7vas of the brachy- 
 cephalic race. 
 
 4. Calvin was a Frefich Siviss ; and Calvinism, the religion of 
 Presbyteriati Scotland, is a more rigid system of dogma than 
 Catholicism itself 
 
 5. To decide that the Lowland Scotch are "averse to sacer- 
 dotalism and have shaken off priestly guidance " is to fall into 
 an extraordinary misconception. Scotch Presbyterianism is one 
 of the most marked developments of sacerdotalism in history ; 
 and Buckle was right in saying that the Presbyterian Scotch 
 have been more priestridden than any other European people 
 save the Spanish. 
 
 6. To call Protestantism the religion of Reason is to flv in 
 the face of all relevant history. Luther was as anti-rationalistic 
 as any Catholic, and more anti-scientific than many Italian 
 cardinals. The aim of Lutherans and Calvinists alike was not 
 in the least to leave the reason free but to formulate all belief on 
 the basis of the Sacred Books. 
 
 7. Instead of being specially given to Reason, the hyper- 
 Teutonic peoples of Scandinavia have been among the last to 
 contribute to the rationalist movement. 
 
 8. The rationalistic movement which began in Germany last 
 
 ^ Poesche and Penka would doubtless set down to brachycephaly, at a 
 hazard, the fact that of old, in the strife of Guelph and Ghibeline, the 
 common people of Germany were often on the side of the Pope and against 
 the Emperor. But the diplomacy of the priesthood would secure that end 
 with peasant heads of any type. 
 
96 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 century is obviously traceable to beginnings made in England 
 and France, which again derived partly from Italy. 
 
 9. While Dutch scholars have done much for Biblical criticism, 
 there is more of popular rationalism in Belgium than in 
 Holland. 
 
 10. In Paris, so far from the mass of the people being sub- 
 missive Catholics, they are Voltairean. The Municipal Council, 
 which supplies a fair test, is notoriously freethinking. And the 
 great majority of the more educated classes are agnostics. 
 
 11. The same holds true of educated men in Italy, and in 
 Russia. 
 
 12. 7/" the Methodism of the Welsh is "emotional," it is not 
 more so than the Methodism of the English in general. 
 
 13. The Highlanders of Scotland, "Celtic" and other, are 
 to-day in the main as rigidly Presbyterian as the Lowlanders 
 were two centuries ago ; and now that the Lowland clergy are 
 growing incoherently heterodox, the Highlands are the strong- 
 hold of orthodox Calvinism. 
 
 14. It is quite true that Protestantism makes no converts in 
 Southern Europe — or in Northern either. But Catholicism 
 does make converts in the North, notably in England. It is 
 not at all a matter of racial boundary. What is happening is 
 a gradual movement of the more emotional or ritual-loving types 
 of religionist to Catholicism ; and of the more rational types to 
 agnosticism. 
 
 15. To single out the neighbourhood of Toulouse as here- 
 ditarily Teutonic and therefore inclined to Protestantism is an 
 extraordinary stroke of argument. Toulouse was one of the 
 most bigoted of Catholic cities and one of the most active centres 
 of the Inquisition ! 
 
 1 6. To single out Nimes, again, as a " stronghold of the 
 Visigoths," is to adjust the evidence to the theory. There were 
 many other old - Teutonic " strongholds " in France. Why did 
 not they also yield multitudes of Huguenots ? And how comes 
 it that La Rochelle, the Huguenot capital, cannot be described 
 as a centre of ancient Teutonism ? As a matter of fact, the 
 Huguenots were stronger in La Rochelle than in Nimes, which 
 latter city, as it happened, had been largely settled from Spain 
 in the reign of Charlemagne, and to this day shows some Spanish 
 affinities. The Protestantism of the people of Nimes, as of 
 many other places, was fundamentally a matter of revolt against 
 the governmental religion rather than a matter of any theological 
 predilection. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 97 
 
 1 7. On Dr Taylor's own showing, " the Swiss " in general are 
 brachycephalic. This applies to Geneva, a centre of Protest- 
 antism from its outset. 
 
 18. To say that England is " orthocephalic " is again to 
 obscure the case. In England there are multitudes of brachy- 
 cephalous people. But it cannot be pretended that they are 
 mostly Catholic, though there is as much sacerdotalism in the 
 High Church party as anywhere. 
 
 The thesis, in fine, breaks down at every point. The straits 
 to which the framers are driven can be seen in the resort to the 
 proposition that the Celtic peoples are " submissive to authority 
 and conservative in instincts " — the exact negative of the common 
 charges with which we have dealt above. It is certainly true 
 that the social and political sequel of the Reformation in Germany 
 was an unparalleled period of moral and physical anarchy and 
 ferocious war, a long riot of evil beside which the French Revolu- 
 tion seems but a brief tempest, clearing the air. All this is 
 conveniently forgotten by those who desire to convict " the Celt," 
 in the person of the French, of an excessive disorderliness. But 
 while Germany as a whole has endured more internecine war 
 than any other European country, it remains the historic fact that 
 the modern Germans, like the ancient, are more and not less 
 " submissive to authority " and " conservative in instinct " than 
 their French neighbours. All the same, it is in Germany, the 
 alleged home of " individualism," that there has arisen the most 
 systematic organisation for the spread of Socialism. If only 
 sociologists, amateur and other, would but look at all the facts 
 of a case before generalising on it, we should have been spared 
 much of the present discussion. One after another, every theory 
 of " innate tendency," the positive and the negative, the most 
 flatly contradictory propositions, all in turn are overthrown ; and 
 the nations successively show every sort of faculty except the 
 master bias which is said to sum them. 
 
 If we were to estimate the " innate capacity " in terms of the 
 date of development, we should be led to put the Teutonic- 
 speaking peoples not among the first but among the last. The 
 great political and intellectual development of Germany, above 
 all the organisation of Germany, it cannot be too emphatically 
 said, is a late modern development ; and this precisely be- 
 cause the German peoples, late as they were in undergoing 
 civilisation from the outside, had no special bias to union and 
 harmony, but on the contrary as strong a bias to intestine strife 
 as any people in history. In the sixteenth century, Ulrich von 
 
 G 
 
98 THE SAXON AND THE CELT, 
 
 Hutten could declare that absolute disunion was the special 
 characteristic of Germans ; and after the Thirty Years' War, the 
 German people seemed the most decisively divided, as they had 
 become in many ways the most backward of the civilised peoples 
 of Europe. The practice of private war between citizens and 
 cities, long abolished in the other civilised States, still subsisted 
 among them down till the sixteenth century, guilds and cities 
 being even then known to challenge each other to combat.^ 
 
 The development of the very idea of a German unity belongs 
 to the present century, the beginning of which saw the German 
 States unable to combine against Napoleon, Saxony and Wirtem- 
 berg fighting on his side against Prussia. And after Prussia had 
 built up her organisation and her power, in virtue not of any gift 
 of race but of the science acquired by her educated adminis- 
 trators, a war between her and the Germanic State of Austria 
 was the first proof of her strength. Finally, it was only on the 
 enormous impulse given to nationalist sentiment by the triumphs 
 of 1870 that the so-called unification of Germany has been 
 achieved. But for that chance, the result of the folly of the 
 French Emperor, whose accession to his throne had represented 
 the rise of new elements of civil disunion in France — elements of 
 disunion which have since grown apace in Germany itself — there 
 would to-day have been no German Empire. The voluntary or 
 federal union of German States revived in the first half of the 
 century was by the mass of Germans themselves reckoned a 
 despicable failure, for which they had only terms of the coarsest 
 contempt.^ It was only on a monarchic and militarist footing 
 that they could combine.^ 
 
 ^ Piitter, Hist, of Pol. Const, of Gerntan Empire, Eng. tr., 1790, i. 378, 
 &c. It is a German publicist who speaks of "that singular German dis- 
 position to seek combat solely for the pleasure of fighting.'" (Eberweck, 
 L''Alleiiiag)ie et les Alleinajids, trad. fran. 185 1, p. 186.) 
 
 ^ Compare the old rhymes : 
 
 Der deutsche Bund 
 Ein tolles Hund, 
 
 and 
 
 Der deutsche Bund, 
 1st Gift und Schund. 
 
 "The German Union — a mad dog" : "The German Union is poison and 
 filth." 
 
 ■* Ur Eberweck, writing his hopeful forecast of German development in 
 1851, declared that " it will assuredly not be the German princes to whom the 
 German people will confide the task of centralising the Fatherland. The 
 German /e^//i; will centralise Germany." {L'Alki/iagiu, ^. 8.) The sequel 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 99 
 
 What remains to be said of the course of Teutonic civiHsation ? 
 This, that within a hundred and fifty years the scattered States 
 of Germany have passed from separateness to political (albeit 
 monarchic) unity, and from a backward and dependent intellectual 
 condition to the status of the most systematically intellectual of 
 the European peoples. It is but a hundred years since the ideal 
 of a German literature was grasped by the German people, 
 previously possessed only of learned specialists, and looking to 
 France, England, and Italy, for light and leading in art and 
 letters.^ What inference then shall a rational inquirer draw? 
 That it was " race " that worked the change, after centuries of 
 impotence ; or that what one race has done other races may do, 
 given but the favouring conditions, and relief from the burdens 
 and barriers of the past ? 
 
 A generation ago, a great sociological historian laid it down 
 that, by reason not of race but of antecedents, the French people 
 for a long time to come would be incapable of constitutional 
 self-government. It was in one of his rash moments that Buckle 
 wrote : — 
 
 " The consequence of all this [long supremacy of the protective 
 spirit] has been that the French, though a great and splendid people 
 — a people full of mettle, high-spirited, abounding in knowledge, and 
 perhaps less oppressed by superstition than any other in Europe — 
 
 has not borne him out. The Eberwecks of that day are to be looked for in 
 the United States. 
 
 ^ The old question of the foreign influence on German literature (discussed 
 by the author in Buckle and his Critics^ pp. 160-174) is thus characteristically 
 dealt with by the too patriotic Herr von Treitschke : — " Poetry remains always 
 the specially national art. Even as its speech is entirely understood only by 
 those of the inner national stock ( Volksgenossen), so does the poet shape the 
 ideal of his conscious striving directly out of the life of his own people : all 
 great Christian nations, however much they may owe to foreign thought- 
 contacts, have made their classical poetry essentially out of their own force. . . . 
 The spirit {das Gemiiih) is national. Ear and eye are cosmopolitan." 
 {^Deutsche Geschichte im Netinzehutoi Jahrhundert, 5ter Theil, 1S94, S. 395.) 
 If this merely means that every people brings its own modifying influence to 
 the culture it absorbs, it is a truism : if it means that there is anything super- 
 latively national in the poetry of Germany, it is a vain saying. There has been 
 no more cosmopolitan culture and no snore cosmopolitan poetry than that of 
 Goethe, to whom we owe the maxim that "national literature to-day has no 
 longer much significance : the time of universal literature has come ; and 
 every one now ought to strive to hasten it on," — And Teutology must be in 
 somewhat sore straits if it is to take to claiming Teutonic credit for the 
 Semitic and Parisian Heine. 
 
lOO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 have always been found unfit to exercise political power. Even when 
 they have possessed it, they have never been able to combine per- 
 manence with liberty. One of these two elements has always been 
 wanting-. They have had free governments, which have not been 
 stable. They have had stable governments, which have not been 
 free. Owing to their fearless temperament they have rebelled, and 
 no doubt will continue to rebel, against so evil a condition. But it 
 does not need the tongue of a prophet to tell that, for at least some 
 generations, all such efforts must be unsuccessful. For men can 
 never be free unless they are educated to freedom." ^ 
 
 It is worth while to note how, in this attempt to limit, even on 
 quasi-scientific grounds, and in no spirit of prejudice, the possi- 
 bilities of development in a nation, even a rationalistic writer 
 falls into fallacy after fallacy. If French history has latterly 
 been, as Buckle here says, an alternation of free and unfree 
 governments, then the unfree governments of recent times (to 
 which the proposition must be held to apply) were not stable. 
 The rebellions to which he alludes had latterly been successful 
 in overthrowing the governments rebelled against — those of 
 Louis XVI., Charles X., and Louis Philippe. Then these 
 governments were no more stable than the others. Again, 
 the proposition that men " can never be free unless they are 
 educated to freedom " is a plain counter-sense. Men can only 
 be " educated to freedom " in relative freedom. There must be 
 a beginning somewhere. In England, says the too patriotic 
 sociologist, " self-discipline, self-reliance, and self-government 
 . . . are matters of hereditary descent, traditional matters which 
 we imbibe in our youth, and which regulate us in the conduct 
 of life. The old associations of the French all point in another 
 direction." The last sentence was true ; but the " hereditary 
 descent" is a sad misnomer. The phrase should have been 
 "matters of long custom" — not so very long custom either. 
 And whereas the non-prophet confidently prophesied that the 
 French could not " for at least some generations " set up a free 
 and stable government, they did as a matter of fact, thirteen 
 years later, set up a republic which has lasted ever since, and 
 now seems tolerably stable, despite the misleading show^ of 
 instability set up by their adoption of the inconsistent English 
 system of cabinets. He who now looks back on French history, 
 from the Revolution onwards, can see that the frequent subver- 
 sions of French Government come in the main from the facts 
 (i) that the French industrial system is always closer to the 
 
 ^ Introd. to Hist, of Civilisation in England, 3-V0I. ed., ii. 126. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RAC^. lOI 
 
 exploding point by reason of its definiteness a-nd l^tck of lo.bnl 
 for expansion, and (2) that the upper classes, knowing this, are 
 ready to anticipate the democratic action of the workers, and 
 to make revolutions in turn. The revolution of 1848, like that 
 of 1830, was semi-democratic. The coup d'etat of 1852 was 
 supported by the monied classes. It is a question of special 
 conditions. All the while, France is a Republic, while England 
 and Germany alike seem still far removed from that consum- 
 mation. 
 
 While delimiting as above the capacity of the French people 
 for self-government. Buckle still more straitly limited the capacity 
 of the Germans. "The German people," he decided, "are . . . 
 more unfit to guide themselves than are the inhabitants either 
 of France or of England." ^ Here, without attempting to measure 
 the degrees of unfitness in question, we have simply to note that 
 United Germany, though certainly tyrannised by its Kaiser about 
 as outrageously as was France under either Napoleon, or England 
 under the third and fourth Georges, shows an ever-growing 
 capacity for self-government, especially in the organisation and 
 maintenance of the Socialist movement — which, however, con- 
 stitutes a risk of future " instability." In short, all propositions 
 denying to any nation the capacity for self-government, whether 
 they be founded on the presuppositions of prejudice or on a 
 simple inference from negative evidence in the past, are to be 
 regarded with utter distrust. " 
 
 Apart from the grounds above dealt with, there is only one 
 on which propositions as to racial tendencies can be quasi- 
 scientifically founded, and that is the fact that individuals do 
 undoubtedly differ in capacities and proclivities. If individuals 
 thus differ, it is asked, why not nations ? The answer is that, 
 precisely because individuals thus vary, there is no collective 
 " national character." The surprising thing is that men who, 
 like Mill, have expressly rejected the notion of racial character ' 
 in particular cases,^ and who even, like him, have unreasonably 
 disputed the existence of innate peculiarities in the individual,^ 
 have yet maintained the abstract thesis that nations have col- 
 lective characters.^ Apparently the confusion turns partly on 
 the habit of identifying temperament with character, and aspect 
 with temperament. "We have seen above how several writers 
 
 1 Vol. I. p. 238. 
 
 - See the Political Economy, B. II. ch. ix., § 3. - 
 * See Professor Bain's biography, y. -S". Mill, p. 146. 
 •* See the Logic, B. vi., c. ix., § 4. 
 
-102 tlJE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 "m'lke but "the ''blond race" to have been in the mass "lymphatic."^ 
 Yet we Kavfe' a'll known blonds who were very vivacious and 
 dark people who were sluggish and dreamy. It may be true 
 that, setting aside points of complexion, there is more vivacity 
 of temperament in some nations than in others — in Frenchmen 
 and Irishmen than in Englishmen, in Italians than in Germans. 
 Such difference of temperament might in some cases plausibly 
 be assumed to result from climate. But here again there is 
 perplexity, for the Spanish are traditionally regarded by many 
 as a grave and dignified people, and the Italian as in comparison 
 undignified and volatile ; while as against the " blind hysterics 
 of the Celt" of France we have the vaunted "furor Teutonicus" 
 and the Berserker-rage of the ancient Norseman. It is extremely 
 difficult to say how much of the outward manner of any nation is 
 a result of recent reactions. Gravity and reserve have come to 
 be fashionable at the conventually-controlled English universities; 
 and stiffness of manner is said to be peculiarly English ; but 
 though Froissart considered the English of his day to " take 
 their pleasures sadly " it does not appear that before the Puritan 
 period they were more sombre than other peoples. And 
 latterly the Germans have been as loud as the French in their 
 strictures on English stiffness. Certainly a German dinner- 
 party makes more noise than any ; but it is hard to see here 
 
 lat becomes of the factor of " race." 
 
 When we look at any nation through the eyes of its own 
 satirists, writing in oblivion of race antagonisms, we seem to 
 find a singular identity of weakness in all. Ibsen, studying 
 Teutonic Scandinavia from within, seems to find in it every 
 species of vice, moral and intellectual, that has been diagnosed 
 in other lands, whether by natives or by enemies ; and he is 
 said to have drawn his Peer Gynt — a type of anything but 
 
 ^ The Baron de Belloguet, who as we have seen takes this view, while 
 insisting that the Galli were not Germani, yet contrives to make them the 
 worse of the two main elements in the French amalgam. He then allots the 
 characteristics of the tall blond and the short dark types : — " To the Gaul/?/r 
 sajig, a fierce and headlong nature, animal irreflexion and impulse, intem- 
 perance, the passion for dress, excessive pride in his race and his exploits, 
 frankness, credulity, magnificent hospitality, simplicity and sluggishness of 
 mind. To the conquered race, vivacity and intelligence, natural eloquence, 
 a jesting humour (which we call to-day V esprit gauloise), unquiet curiosity, 
 acuteness, and the faculties of invention and imitation, whence that remark- 
 able aptitude of the transalpine cities for a rapid civilisation." {Le Gdnie 
 Gajilois, p. 47.) Needless to say, this estimate has no more value to-day than 
 those which give all the virtues to the Teutons. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 103 
 
 stedfastness of character — as a kind of emblem of his nation. 
 However that may be, his personages show none of that 
 monopoly of merit which legend ascribes to Teutondom at 
 large. If, again, we could suppose the apparition in a " Celtic " 
 country of two such monarchs as the present German Kaiser and 
 his granduncle, who was king of Prussia in 1848, we can imagine 
 how confidently two such " types " would have been cited as 
 being possible only in the Celtic races. If " types " there be, 
 they are singularly hard to isolate on racial lines. 
 
 Nothing is commoner, as we have seen, than the drawing of 
 contrasts between Germans and French, Teutons and non- 
 Teutons, the Teuton being usually conceived by himself and 
 his worshippers, in these latter days, as a fine compound of 
 profundity and practicality, sagacity and strength. Yet it is 
 only some half-a-century since Freiligrath's phrase, " Germany is 
 Hamlet," passed current among Teutophiles as a true generalisa- 
 tion; and when we go behind the outworks of German patriotism 
 we find that there is no special consciousness of unity of type in 
 the Fatherland when its children forget to be patriotic. They of 
 the north have a more or less genial contempt for those of the 
 south, somewhat as happens in " united " Italy. And a cosmo- 
 politan-minded German has made out type-portraits for northern 
 and southern Germany which play a good deal of havoc with 
 other pictures of Teuton versus Celt. " In the south, you find 
 naivete, spontaneity : in the north reflection, ratiocinative medita- 
 tion. Yet it is not practical good sense that is lacking among 
 the southerns ; the cunning of the Wirtembergers and the Swiss, 
 in matters of self-interest, is proverbial. . . . The northern 
 German distinguishes himself from his southern compatriot by 
 a brilliant and cutting intelligence, cold and pitiless," ^ and so on. 
 And it is this same northerner who for Taine and a dozen other 
 generalisers is the typical " dreamy," introspective, mystical 
 Teuton. It only needs to compare the formulas of any score of 
 type-drawers to see that no outline whatever holds good for the 
 judgment of any group concerned, the pretended unity always 
 dissolving in a multitude of differences. ^ 
 
 1 Eberweck, as cited, pp. 603-610. 
 
 ^ The good Eberweck, while giving professed proofs that Germans differ 
 greatly among themselves by latitude and longitude, pauses to protest that all 
 the same they are at bottom homogeneous : " In each nationality there exist 
 opposed qualities: each is composed, so to speak, of living contradictions; 
 but the contradictions are at bottom only the diverse sides of the same funda- 
 mental force " (Work cited, p. 608). We seem to be reading a paraphrase 
 
I04 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 But whether or not there be preponderating types of tempera- 
 ment in nations, it is quite clear that temperaments do not 
 determine poHtical history any more than they do the processes 
 i of logic. There are mathematicians and chemists, poets and 
 artists, soldiers and thinkers, rationalists and pietists, in one 
 nation as in another ; and the clash of class interests, which is 
 the fundamental factor in politics, goes on alike in all. England 
 was the scene of a long civil war, ending in a regicide, and of a 
 second revolution, ending in a king's exile, when France was 
 thoroughly monarchic. When France in turn effected a revolu- 
 tion and a regicide, aristocratic England, being now unitedly 
 monarchic, saw the explanation in vices of French character, 
 ^.^ociology might by this time be a little more intelligent. The 
 / destinies of nations are the outcome not of any special heredity 
 / but of special conditions. The people of the United States, 
 I with an inheritance of self-government, underwent a dreadful 
 ' civil war by reason of the peculiar difficulty of one of their 
 problems. If any other nation suffers specially from civil strife 
 y or disunion the cause is to be looked for in its case, in 
 ! the same way, in conditions, and not in any imaginary 
 tendency of " character." If we found any nation predomi- 
 nantly given to murder, or to theft, or to fallacy, we might 
 begin to surmise some total heredity of characteristics ; but 
 when we find that whatever measurable differences exist 
 — as in matters of sobriety and religiosity — are perfectly 
 explicable in terms of climate and institutions, it is mere 
 primitive empiricism to assume a heredity of political or indus- 
 trial character.^ Even supposing that French revolutionary 
 heat or Irish industrial discouragement were inheritable, and 
 not rather matters likely to set up reaction and a contrary 
 
 of the Athanasian creed. All the while, Eberweck, as we have seen, was 
 pleading for international fraternity, and repudiating the spirit of race- 
 antagonism. 
 
 ' It has been argued, by an ethnologist who maintained the permanence of 
 differences of skull types, that *' the consequent permanence of moral and 
 iniellectual peculiarities of types cannot be denied " by naturalists. (J. C. Nott, 
 in Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, 1854, p. 50.) But even if it were 
 true that general types of skull persisted as this writer claims, it does not in the 
 least follow that minor modifications of skull shape were not visible in the 
 very specimens under his eyes. Such modifications could perfectly permit of 
 modifications of brain development, both as to form and as to convolution, 
 sufficient to carry profound modifications of mental and temperamental 
 tendency. Indeed, the occurrence of the latter modifications lies on the face 
 of all history. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. IO5 
 
 bias in posterity, it would not in the least follow that they would 
 be inherited. If special characteristics of individuals are found 
 in multitudes of cases 7iot to be inherited, all heredity depending 
 on certain combinations in the parents, on what ground can we 
 suppose that any predominant intellectual or moral characteristic 
 in a nation — supposing one to exist at a given moment — will 
 persist under changed conditions ? Cromwell's sons were un- 
 Puritanical. Then, on the very principle under dispute, a nation 
 may change its characteristics in a generation. In fact, a large 
 part of the proof currently offered for the assertion that certain 
 races have a persistent collective character turns out to be proof, 
 on the contrary, that the alleged national bias changes. French 
 characteristics, we are told, for example, remain the same. But 
 Frenchmen have changed their form of government in essentials 
 nine or ten times since the Revolution. Then it is a French 
 characteristic to be changeable. But for a hundred and fifty 
 years before the Revolution their government had been stable. 
 Then it is characteristic of Frenchmen to be submissive to 
 despotism. 
 
 In the same way we have all been accustomed to hear the 
 French people described, even by some of themselves, as ill-fitted 
 for colonisation, partly by reason of infecundity, partly by reason 
 of special devotion to their motherland. From these premisses 
 we reach the conclusion that the Anglo-Saxon " race " is in com- 
 parison innately fruitful, and hereditarily given to colonising. 
 We have only to turn to Canada to get a clear proof to the 
 contrary. In sheer fecundity, the French settlers there have 
 excelled all others, and, other things being equal, they are just 
 as effective citizens. Their case suffices to show once for all 
 that it was simply the special political conditions of French and 
 English development in the seventeenth century that determined 
 the advance of one race and the check of the other in colonisa- 
 tion and conquest. France was in a period of political anchylosis 
 and artificially paralysed powers, while England, as a result of 
 certain political accidents,^ was in a period of free energy and 
 unhampered expansion. 
 
 ^ I use this term, which is sometimes loosely employed and sometimes un- 
 inlelligently condemned, to signify, in politics, such turns of affairs as a change 
 of dynasty vitally affecting the practice of government. Such a turn occurred 
 when James II. turned Catholic; when the many children of Anne predeceased 
 her; when the succession of the House of Hanover brought to the English 
 throne kings who could not speak English, and so on. The advent to power 
 of an administrator of genius like Chatham may also be termed an accident. 
 
I06 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Even as regards the supposed insurmountable lothness of 
 Frenchmen to leave their native land — a lothness which, so far 
 as it exists, is reasonably to be attributed to the special bright- 
 ness of French life — we meet with emphatic testimony which, so 
 far as it goes, reverses the current doctrine. It is a typical 
 Englishman who thus contrasts English and French colonisation 
 in the East : — 
 
 "You cannot convince an English settler that he will be abroad for 
 an indefinite number of years, the idea would be equivalent to trans- 
 portation : he consoles himself with the hope that something will turn 
 up to alter the apparent certainty of his exile ; and in this hope, with 
 his mind ever fixed upon his return, he does little for posterity in the 
 colony. He rarely even plants a fruit-tree, hoping that his stay will 
 not allow him to gather from it. This accounts for the poverty of the 
 gardens and enclosures around the houses of the English inhabitants, 
 and the general dearth of any fruits worth eating. 
 
 "How different is the appearance of French colonies, and how 
 different are the feehngs of the settler ! The word 'Adieu' once 
 spoken, he sighs an eternal farewell to the shores of ' La belle France,' 
 and with the natural light-heartedness of the nation, he settles cheer- 
 fully in a colony as his adopted country. He lays out his grounds 
 with taste, and plants groves of exquisite fruit-trees, whose produce 
 will, he hopes, be tasted by his children and grandchildren. Accord- 
 ingly, in a French colony there is a tropical beauty in the cultivated 
 trees and flowers which is seldoin seen in our own possessions. . . . 
 A Frenchman is necessarily a better settler : everything is arranged 
 for permanency, from the building of a house to the cultivation of an 
 estate. He does not distress his land for immediate profit, but from 
 the very commencement he adopts a system of the highest cultiva- 
 tion." 1 ' 
 
 When one after another of the most confidently vended 
 generalisations as to national gifts and defects are found thus 
 astray, it is surely time to abandon such principles of interpreta- 
 tion in political science. They do but cumber the ground of 
 rational political construction, and obscure the problems of 
 international ethics. In the least provincial form, as in the 
 attribution of certain civilising qualities to "Aryans," they are 
 as vicious and as pernicious as in the narrow forms in which 
 the people of the provinces of one State, and of the villages of 
 one province, express their unreasoned sense of superiority to 
 each other. Even on the current hypothesis, the " Aryan race " 
 
 ^ Sir Samuel W. Baker, Eight Years in Ceylon, ed. 1890, pp. 88-89. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. IO7 
 
 was later civilised than the "Semitic" or " Hamitic " ; and there 
 is no reason to believe that it would ever have been civilised 
 at all but for its contacts with previous civilisations. Herr 
 Poesche, after working out his hypothesis of albinoism, cannot 
 forbear to throw in a peroration on the adorable Aryanity of 
 the Aryans, for which he can offer no true scientific justification. 
 First he exults over the primitive chastity of the red-haired 
 Germani/ as described by Tacitus : — " What a noble picture 
 of a simple, chaste, brave people ! No wonder that in this 
 wedlock were born the conquerors of the world." - The same 
 trait of constitutional chastity, be it observed, has been attributed 
 to some tribes of North American Indians,^ who like the Ger- 
 mani were proud of making wastes round their villages, and 
 of plundering other tribes, and who were equally disdainful of 
 agriculture. On the other hand, the ethnologist says nothing 
 of the drunkenness of his chaste barbarians ; nothing of the 
 fact that the world they overran was a decaying one ; nothing 
 of their own rapid vitiation and decay, nothing of their ad- 
 mitted disappearance from the scene of their ancient conquests. 
 Taken together, the facts suggest, if anything at all, that the 
 Teutonic race in the days of its greatest real diffusion (that is, in 
 the period 400-1200 of our era) was a mere vehicle of brute 
 force, counting against rather than for civilisation. It seems to 
 have had the combined military advantages of numbers (drawn 
 however from a very wide area), of good physical development 
 (though not of endurance of heat and toil), and of constant prac- 
 tice in hunting,* as against races who for various reasons multi- 
 plied less freely and lived more industrial lives. This holds true 
 of the success of the so-called " Celts," whom we have seen to 
 resemble the Teutons, against the so-called " Iberians " or the 
 " Ligurians " or " Silurians." A writer who is scientifically impar- 
 tial as between so-called Celt and Teuton, is found weighting the 
 
 ^ Despite his principle of pan-Aryanism, Herr Poesche must needs make the 
 usual remark (S. 176) on the similarity between the modern (dark) French and 
 the ancient (blond) Galli, of whom Cato said that they chiefly cared for war 
 and rhetoric (rem 7nilitaretn et argute loqui). If modern Germans have not 
 attained the argtite loqui, it is surely not for want of trj-ing. As regards the 
 rem militatevi, they may surely claim to have out-Galled the Galli. 
 
 - Die Arier, S. 209. 
 
 ^ Kingsley, while accusing the Redskins of universal licentiousness, ac- 
 knowledges the combination of chastity and ferocity among the Caribs. Roman 
 and Teuton, p. 8. 
 
 ■* Compare the preparation of the Macedonians of Alexander, as discussed 
 by Professor MahafTy in his Alexander s Empire. 
 
I08 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 scales for both against the " Iberian," apparently because the 
 Iberian was defeated. Contrasting an abnormally narrow 
 Iberian skull with an abnormally broad Celtic skull, Dr Taylor 
 decides ^ that in the latter " tlie broad, capacious forehead and 
 the short square chin indicate mental power and determination 
 of character," while he judges that the former is " weak " because 
 the upper lip and the chin are long. Now, the forehead of the 
 broad skull is not at all " capacious " relatively to the mass of 
 l>07iy structure ; the Iberian forehead, which he calls " narrow," is 
 relatively much more capacious ; and the face need no more 
 have been weak, even in appearance, than that of Sir Walter 
 Scott, whose upper lip was long, and whose head was narrow. 
 There is really nothing to tell us whether or not the Iberian 
 character was weaker or less tenacious than the Celtic, even in 
 the solitary and extreme instances here contrasted.^ There is not 
 even valid evidence for the assertion ^ that the more powerful 
 race at the time of contact "possessed a higher civilisation." 
 The only proof offered is that " in the long barrows [of the 
 smaller or " Iberian " race] metal is absent and pottery is rare, 
 while the presence of pottery is a distinctive feature of the 
 [Celtic] round barrows, and bronze is not unknown." But it 
 may have been the practice of one race to put pottery in its 
 graves, while the other might possess pottery without so deposit- 
 ing it ; and the possession of bronze, even if peculiar to the 
 former race, may have been attained only at a late period. For 
 all we know, the so-called Iberian race, with its delicate osseous 
 structures, may have been much the more civilised of the two ; 
 as the conquering Anglo-Saxons of a later period seem, on Dr 
 Taylor's own testimony, to have had absolutely smaller brains, 
 despite their much greater stature, than the much earlier 
 " Iberians " of Britain. 
 
 " The skulls from the Anglo-Saxon graves, although dolichocephalic, 
 like those from the long barrows, are unmistakably dissimilar. The 
 forehead is more retreating, the cranial vault lower, and the mean 
 cranial capacity mucJi less, in the one case amounting to 1524 cubic 
 centimetres, or 93 cubic inches, in the other only to 141 2 cubic centi- 
 
 ^ As cited, p. 73. 
 
 ^ It is odd that while phrenology is commonly tabooed in the name of exact 
 science, the loosest guesses from physiognomy pass current among scientific 
 men, and the relatively exact tests of phrenology are ignored in these matters. 
 
 ''Id., p. 78. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. IO9 
 
 metres, or 86 cubic inches. . . . Moreover, one [the Anglo-Saxon] 
 race was tall, often over six feet, the other exceptionally short." ^ 
 
 So that the conquest by the Celts may but have been the 
 physical triumph of the less-evolved and more numerous race 
 over the higher, and the conquest of the mixed race by the 
 Saxons a further triumph of a lower race still. In which case 
 the modern dwindling of the old Teutonic type would represent, 
 not any victory of race over race, but the final victory of civilisa- 
 tion over forces which threw it back ages ago. 
 
 Yet the Teutophile persists in crediting modern civilisation 
 itself to the virtue of his small-brained ancestors. It is after 
 noting with other inquirers how generally the blond type, which 
 
 ^ Id., p. 102. In the tables of skull capacity given by Topinard (Aii(h)-o- 
 pology, Eng. tr. , p. 230) the sl<ull capacity of the Merovingians is similarly 
 placed very low — between that of the Chinese and the New Caledonians. If 
 ail these measurements be accurate, they go far to quash one of the premisses 
 of some writers of the school of Weismann. Professor Haycraft, for instance 
 [Dai-ivinisin and Race Progress, p. 1 1 5), argues concerning the Anglo-Saxon 
 skulls in question that " when we look at them we feel that there is no reason 
 to assume that they are of a lower type than our own, or that the men and 
 women of whom they are the remains would not, were they possessed of our 
 advantages of education, &c., take an equal status in society with us." If 
 such problems are to be settled by what "we feel when we look," this may 
 hold good ; but one would expect a professed biologist to look for a more 
 scientific test. Nobody doubts that some of the skulls "from the Vikings' 
 graves must have belonged to magnificent specimens of humanity " — in respect 
 of stature and strength — but there is really no reason whatever for, and many 
 against, the assumption that the Vikings in question, if educated in our day, 
 would constitute normal civilised types. Of course there are still many people 
 of extremely small intelligence and strong combative passions in all classes, 
 from the "upper" to the lowest ; many of our aristocrats, for instance, being 
 but well-bred microcephali, or "grooms in the wrong place." But if by 
 "us" is understood the average of our non-criminal class, including the more 
 as well as the less intellectual people, then Professor Haycraft's thesis cannot 
 stand. It is one of those assumptions which exhibit Weismannism as in 
 part a process of finding pretexts for a presupposition. If we are to frame 
 any hypothesis in the matter at all we are bound first of all to make compara- 
 tive measurements of skull capacities, with especial regard to the frontal con- 
 volutions, and if we are scrupulous we shall further recognise the probability 
 that development of convolutions within a given cranial space may vary with 
 osseous characteristics. (C/. De Quatrefages, Hmnaii Species, Eng. tr., 
 p. 382.) But here again, while the relatively scientific and inductive method 
 of phrenology is set aside in the schools as charlatanism, we find professed 
 and trained biologists reaching conclusions as to brain capacity by the merest 
 guess-work. 
 
I lO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 for him is the Aryan, is being superseded by others up to the 
 very verge of Scandinavia, that Herr Poesche exclaims: — "They 
 have been for thousands of years the active part of mankind, to 
 whom all the initiative in history belongs, the inheritors of all 
 previous historic periods and cultures, the creators of all the 
 coming ones " ; going on to picture the " Aryan spirit ruling 
 and ordering everywhere." "The Aryans possess force and 
 might " — they and they alone. ^ 
 
 It is wholesome to turn from such rhetoric to historic retrospect, 
 and to remember how twelve hundred years ago the Saracens 
 overran the Aryan kingdoms of northern Africa and Spain ; how 
 five hundred years ago the Turks captured still-Aryan Constanti- 
 nople ; and how much of modern Aryan science derives originally 
 from Saracen contact in the Middle Ages. The Saracen civilisa- 
 tion, after wonderful developments, was arrested, the elements 
 of progress within it being strangled by the elements of con- 
 servatism, represented by the cult of the Sacred Book ; and the 
 political framework being overthrown by the revived militarism 
 of the Christian foe. But it was no special heredity of race that 
 wrought the failure, any more than it was any gift of race which 
 saved Western Christendom from a similar strangling of the spirit 
 of science by the spirit of superstition. What saved Christian 
 Europe was its miscellaneity and the interaction of its component 
 parts, somewhat as the interaction of the city-states of Greece so 
 long sustained and stimulated Greek civilisation. The distribu- 
 tion of the intellectual forces of Europe through so many inde- 
 pendent States made impossible their simultaneous suppression ; 
 and if the Saracen civilisation had been in anything like free and 
 friendly contact with the Christian polities it too might have 
 gained enough from the stimulus to overcome the malady of 
 creed. But Christian malice, concurring with Mohammedan, 
 kept Islamic civilisation isolated ; and the faculties which, even 
 thus, had done so much to develop science in Europe, were lost 
 to the common cause of intelligence. How little " race " has to 
 do with the matter may be realised by any one who will estimate 
 the extent to which intelligence in Christian Spain has been 
 eliminated or paralysed during the three hundred years since the 
 religious factor obtained in her polity the same fatal predomin- 
 
 j^- ance that had ruined the previous civilisation of the Moors. 
 
 ' Rationally considered, every one of the races under notice is 
 
 capable of an intellectual renascence, given the fitting sociological 
 conditions. Even the civilisation of Turkey, the history^oTwhich 
 1 As cited, S. 238. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE, I I 1 
 
 Buckle declared he could write on the back of his hand, is no 
 dead trunk, but one capable of blossoming into fruitfulness if fed 
 with the sap of a freshly-stirred soil.^ The due conditions may 
 or may not occur : as to that we can make no prediction : but 
 we can confidently say that there is nothing in " race " to exclude 
 the possibility, though an era of inertia is not easily to be 
 countervailed. Inertia may supervene in any race under certain 
 conditions. We have heard much of the theoretic superiority of 
 the stock of the Pilgrim Fathers, to whose original virtues, real 
 and imaginary, some people attribute most of the progress made 
 in modern times in the United States, putting down to Irish 
 immigration all the blemishes of modern American politics. As 
 a matter of fact, the Pilgrims promptly proved themselves to be 
 quite average people in respect of their incapacity for cooperative 
 industry ; - and their fanaticism was a profoundly anti-social in- 
 fluence throughout the whole of the really Puritan period. The 
 Revolution itself was clearly made by the combination of such 
 new forces as the idealistic political devotion of Washington, 
 not at all a Puritanic type, and the intellectual stimulation given 
 by Paine, who was still less so. Finally it would appear that in 
 •our own day the old Puritan stock, where living as nearly as 
 possible in the original conditions, is as distinctly marked by 
 moral and intellectual atrophy as any civilised population of 
 which we have knowledge. The stories, for instance, of Miss 
 Mary Wilkins, pronounced by her most competent compatriots 
 an excellent observer, reveal in New England life a kind of 
 anchylosis of character, a running down of all elements into a 
 kind of imbecile passive malignity,^ that seems far further away 
 from healthy civilisation than any of the faults of the Irish 
 peasantry. 
 
 Here we have a bad case of stagnation, if not of decadence, 
 in a stock which was probably much over-praised at its best, but 
 which in any case passes as a crack " Teutonic " type. The 
 stagnation is seen to be like all other phenomena a matter of 
 conditions ; and to conditions, accordingly, we are to trace 
 similar phenomena in other races, the more readily because all 
 alike can claim positive achievements in favourable circum- 
 
 ' As to the case of China, see the author's Iiit7-odiiction to Modern English 
 Politics in the Free Review, Nov. 1894, pp. 175, 182. 
 
 - See Mr Goldwin Smith's History of the United States, p. 23, and com- 
 pare his earlier language concerning the Pilgrim Fathers in Three English 
 Statesmen, 1867, People's ed. , p. 74. 
 
 ' See in particular Miss Wilkins' novel, Pembroke. 
 
112 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 stances. It lies on the face of Herr Poesche's own thesis that 
 the progress of modern Europe, which he says is due to the 
 Aryan race, is rather due to non- Aryans — the "pigmented" 
 brachycephalic breeds who have so nearly crowded-out the 
 blonds.^ If one or more non-Aryan stocks can thus successfully 
 compete with the Aryan, so may any of the rest, given the 
 necessary culture-conditions. The "Aryan" creed in sociology 
 is finally no better founded than the Athanasian creed in 
 theology. When all is said it is found that the " Semites " 
 alone, though declared by some to show constant signs of 
 degeneration, are the toughest of all the competing races of 
 the world. The Jews, — scourged, as the physicians tell us, 
 by neurosis and diabetes — are yet the most generally in- 
 destructible.- And while the self-styled Aryan prates of the 
 predominance of his species, the lands in which his tongue is 
 spoken are chronically convulsed by wild outcry against the 
 domination of the Semite, who wields the all-compelling power 
 of the purse ; yet at the same time, as if to show at a glance the 
 nullity of the theory which in turn makes him merely a manipu- 
 lator of money, contributes to " the general deed of man " the 
 most opposing influences, producing at once Lassalle and Roths- 
 child, Marx and Hirsch, Ricardo and Disraeli, Jew and Philis- 
 tine. The spontaneous variation of the stock defies alike the 
 ideal of the Rabbin, the pressure of Christian animus, and the 
 sentimental exhortations of the neo-separatists, who found their 
 mouthpiece in George Eliot, in the years of her declining powers 
 and dissolving principles. The Jew, despite all such appeals, 
 verily will not go back to Jerusalem. " Except for the compara- 
 tive infrequency of the more bestial types of men and women," 
 says a brilliant observer of that race, " Judaea [ = modern Jewry] 
 has always been a cosmos in little ; and its prize-fighters and 
 scientists, its philosophers and ' fences,' its gymnasts and money- 
 lenders, its scholars and stock-brokers, its musicians, its chess- 
 
 1 Compare Dr Taylor : " The genius of Germany comes from the other [the 
 brachycephalic] race, to which Luther and Goethe both belonged. . . . The in- 
 tellect and genius of Europe, the great writers, and more especially the men 
 of science, belong rather to the brachycephalic race which has so profoundly 
 modified the physical type in Germany, France, Italy, and England" (Orighi 
 of the Aryans, pp. 245-246). I do not say these assertions are proved, but 
 they follow from the Teiitoiiist premisses. 
 
 2 " Nur die Juden acclimatisiren und erhalten sich in alien Landern." 
 Penka, Die Herkunfl der Arier, S. 95, citing Boudin, Du no7i-cos»io- 
 politisme des races humaincs (Mem. de la Soc. d'anthrop. de Paris, i. 93-123). 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. II3 
 
 players, poets, comic-singers, lunatics, saints, publicans, poli- 
 ticians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors, foreign cor- 
 respondents, have always been in the front rank." ^ And in the 
 sections of this "race," which, though in antiquity it was certainly 
 an amalgam like all others, has probably been the least mixed of 
 all for some two thousand years,- — even within this we tind in full 
 play the very spirit of irrational discrimination which has branded 
 the whole race, (on its own invitation) as " peculiar." " Spanish 
 Jews," says our Jewish observer, "earliest arrivals [in England] 
 by way of Holland, after the restoration, are a class apart, and 
 look down on the later imported Ashkenazim, embracing both 
 Poles and Dutchmen in their impartial contempt. But this does 
 not prevent the Pole and the Dutchman from despising each other. 
 To a Dutch or Russian Jew, the ' Pullack ' or Polish Jew is a poor 
 creature ; and scarce anything can exceed the complacency with 
 which the ' Pullack ' looks down on the ' Litvok ' or Lithuanian, 
 the degraded being whose ' Shibboleth ' is literally ' Sibboleth,' 
 and who says ' ee ' where rightly-constituted persons say ' 00.' To 
 mimic the mincing pronunciation of the ' Litvok ' affords the 
 ' Pullack ' a sense of superiority almost equalling that possessed 
 by the English Jew, whose mispronunciation of the Holy Tongue 
 is his title to rank far above all foreign varieties." ^ The humorist 
 goes on to assure that " yet a vein of brotherhood runs beneath 
 all these feelings of mutual superiority ; like the cliqueism which 
 draws together ' old clo ' dealers, though each gives fifty per cent 
 more than any other dealer in the trade." It is even so. Such 
 are in reality the brotherhoods of races, a mirage of sentiment 
 beyond the desert of self-seeking, a mood that comes and goes. 
 
 There might be found, one thinks, in the history of the Jewish 
 race in particular, the most overwhelming demonstration of the 
 deadliness of the spirit of racial separateness when erected into a 
 cult, though it has been possible to quasi-scientific minds even 
 in our own day to read the lesson backwards. Among all the 
 nations of antiquity it stood out by reason of the enormous 
 arrogance of its pretence of superiority, resting as it did its whole 
 culture on a doctrine of racial monopoly in religion. To that 
 
 ^ I. Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, proem. 
 
 ^ Yet Mr Zangwill seems to take it for granted that the Jews of the clifterent 
 countries not only assimilate the moral characteristics of their neighbours {e.g., 
 p. 45) but approximate to their facial type {e.g., p. 252). And indeed the 
 difference between the Peninsular type of Jew and some others is often so 
 great as to suggest a considerable interfusion of Moorish blood. 
 
 ^ Id., pp. 16-17 (i-vol. ed.). Cf. p. 328. 
 
 H 
 
114 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 insane claim the world has given its brutal answer ^ during two 
 thousand years, till in our own day there rises here and there the 
 hope that the claim and the retort will together pass out of the 
 problem of civilisation, so hard to solve even apart from such 
 insensate complications. Surely we may cherish so circumspect 
 a hope. It is a Jewish scholar, I believe, who undertakes most 
 diligently to dispel " the oriental mirage." Surely we may hope 
 ere long to do more, and to dissipate for Jew and Gentile that 
 still more ancient mirage which is distilled from the primordial 
 prejudice of race. 
 
 § 7. The Ethic of the Race Instinct. 
 
 There is, however, a final aspect of the race question which 
 it may be well to consider before we turn from it to study the 
 Irish problem on lines of inductive science. I mean the philo- 
 sophic aspect. Racial antipathy or prejudice, with which we 
 have thus been dealing, is obviously correlative with racial 
 enthusiasm, such as confronts us in the Irish nationalist move- 
 ment. Men belittle what they suppose to be an alien race 
 because they esteem their own. And I may be accused of 
 accepting and justifying the instinct of race on the positive side, 
 
 ^ If we may judge from Mr Zangwill's pages, it does not seem to be often 
 realised, even by the most intelligent Jews, that in the matter of exclusiveness 
 and arrogance it was the Jews who began, and that it is they — the orthodox 
 among them — who most zealously keep up the note. The best among them 
 continue dutifully the prayer: "Pour out Thy wrath on the heathen who 
 acknowledge thee not, and upon the kingdoms which invoke not Thy name. 
 . . . Pursue them in wrath, and destroy them from under the heavens of the 
 Lord" (Work cited, p. 237). Compare the racial self-glorifications put in the 
 mouths of some of the best characters in the book. And even the half-free- 
 thinking Esther is made to sob : " Surely the people of Christ have been the 
 Christ of peoples " — using the expression in the Christian connotation. The 
 whole of Mr Zangwill's book is thus instructive as to the psychology of the 
 racial fallacy. The brilliant author himself, even while picturing the most 
 mindless formalism among the orthodox of his race, credits them with "omni- 
 present ability," and claims at the outset that the faults of the Ghetto "are 
 bred of its hovering miasma of persecution " — as if there would be no faults 
 but for that. And after all this, we find Mr Zangwill making violent fun of 
 the so-called "Celtic Renaissance," as if it were not philosophically on all 
 fours with much of the Jewish sentiment which he sets forth so sympathetically. 
 George Eliot professed to revere the race instinct all round, while preaching it 
 to the Jews ; but some of her auditors seem to wish to keep it as an exclu- 
 sively Judaic possession, like the Jehovah of the past and the roast-Leviathan 
 of the future state. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. II5 
 
 the side of the claim of a population to separate political 
 institutions on grounds of race, while discrediting it on the 
 negative side, in respect of all pretences that certain races, as 
 such, lack any capacity essential to self-government. If it is 
 absurd for Englishmen to disparage the Celt, I may be told, it 
 is equally absurd for Irishmen to stand on their Celticity. 
 There is here a possibility of confusion which may as well be 
 guarded against. 
 
 All racial self-glorification, it is clear, is an irrational play of 
 instinct. It is habitually indulged-in, tolerated, and applauded 
 in civilised countries, where individual self-praise is regarded as 
 a clear sign of fatuity when not resorted to in self-vindication 
 against blame. Yet praise of one's nation is certainly a product 
 of self-regarding vanity, and is at the same time, in the eye of 
 strict reason, more absurd. Self-praise, though unpleasing to 
 others, may be just — may be such as another could justly bestow. 
 But to take personal pride in vaunting one's nation is, rationally 
 speaking, the merest inconsequence. If our nation has in any 
 way distinguished itself, we are individually no more entitled 
 to plume ourselves on the fact than is a single undistinguished 
 person to plume himself on being descended from a famous 
 man. Aristocratic pride of birth has long been laughed out of 
 discussion ; and it is not found that descendants of great writers 
 or artists seek on that score to claim any social deference. 
 But we are here on that borderland of rational ethics which is 
 sooner or later reached in the analysis of all problems of conduct, 
 and we must go warily. Pride in one's nation, like pride in 
 friends, is after all a spontaneous emotion, like joy in another's 
 beauty, or in one's own success. There is but one test. Emotion 
 is the ultimate fact in well-being, as indeed in consciousness ; 
 and, there being no thought as there is no fear of stamping out 
 all emotion that is joyous, the business of ethical criticism is 
 found to consist in settling what forms of joy are anti-social.^ 
 Once recognised as such, they are more or less nearly destroyed; 
 the loss, however, bringing its compensation in the higher and 
 broader if less violent satisfaction of a substituted good-will.- 
 
 Now, it is obvious at a glance that though racial ill-will 
 
 ^ This point is dealt with at some length in the authors lecture on 
 T/te Pleasures of Malignity (South Place Institute, London). 
 
 ^ " It is not, as Spinoza has shown, by arguing away our emotions, but 
 by confronting them with still stronger emotions, that they are, if necessary, 
 to be overcome." (Benn, The Greek Philosophers, 1882, ii. 94, citing Spinoza, 
 Ethica, Pars, iv., Prop. 7.) 
 
I 
 
 Il6 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 depends upon a primary instinct of patriotism, that primary 
 instinct does not necessarily involve a correlative ill-will to the 
 point of ill-doing. When Mr Green writes that " no spot in 
 ritain can be so sacred to Englishmen as that which first felt 
 the tread of English feet," irrational as the sentiment is, it can 
 hardly be said to promote anything worse than similar sentiment. 
 It does not set up any tendency to applaud the deeds of the 
 brutal crews of Hengist and Horsa, slayers of women and babes. 
 And so when Mr Freeman, writing for Englishmen who are 
 descended alike from Saxons and Normans, gravely tells how 
 " our fathers " cried " Out " to the Normans in the stockade at 
 Hastings, he is not likely to move an adult reader to anything 
 more than a smile. In other directions, of course, a similar 
 primitiveness of feeling easily takes on a sinister colour and 
 works unqualified harm. Thus there is downright maleficence 
 where race-prejudice confirms Englishmen in a policy of 
 oppression towards Ireland, and in a less degree where it moves 
 Frenchmen and Germans to a chronic reciprocity of insolence. 
 But where on the other hand the sentiment of race moves a 
 misgoverned and unhappy population to demand its freedom, 
 its choice of its system of government, as in the case of the 
 Italian majority resisting Austria, or the Irish majority demand- 
 ing Home Rule, the ethical situation is profoundly different. 
 The emotion here is substantially self-regardihg ; it is malevo- 
 lent only in so far as it resents maleficence ; it is a demand to 
 stand on that footing of equality which is the necessary condition 
 of any true moral relation. If the Italian is content to be free, 
 planning no further conflict; if the Irishman is content with 
 federal Home Rule (we shall consider later what are the just 
 conditions), there is a clear gain to human well-being, in 
 that a whole population is put on the plane of responsible 
 self-government where formerly it was below that plane. 
 That an Englishman, then, should cease to contemn and vilify 
 his Irish neighbours, by way of ceasing to over-esteem his own 
 race, is a step forward in morals. He has the gain of substi- 
 tuting a higher for a lower emotion : and he loses no motive- 
 power for good. But that an Irishman should over-esteem his 
 own race in his resentment of English oppression is not in turn 
 an evil, so long as it is part of his motive-power to strive for a 
 political reform. That he should in many cases bear ill-will to 
 the Englishman as Englishman, and deny his capacity for certain 
 kinds of well-doing — such as justice, mercy, and truth — is a 
 deplorable concomitant of the state of bitter political strife ; 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. II7 
 
 but there is only one possible way to the cure of the evil, 
 and that is, not that the Irishman's should rise to the super- 
 normal height of loving his enemy while the enemy remains 
 unchanged, but that the enemy should consent to cease from - 
 provocation. After that, both alike may purify themselves of 
 the animal instinct of patriotism, and rise to that higher form 
 of feeling which, desiring good for our own community, and 
 striving of necessity first for that, equally desires good to all 
 others and contemns none. In short, as the normal man 
 cannot rise to the highest forms of goodness so long as he is 
 enslaved, so a nation cannot rise above the pride or passion 
 of race till after it has known of itself what the successful 
 self-assertion of race means. It must stand on the ordinary 
 plane of nations before it can be expected to cast out a form 
 of primitive emotion which, in the terms of the case, nations 
 already on that plane still cherish. And it cannot be too 
 emphatically said that any man who calls on a dependent 
 people to be satisfied to remain dependent, and to put the 
 sentiment of race eciuality out of its thoughts, is rather ethically 
 obtuse than ethically superior. We may be quite sure that the 
 Englishman who in the present posture of affairs affects to 
 despise the Irish sentiment of nationality, would, had he been 
 born an Irishman, have been a hater of England — unless he 
 be altogether incapable of a social sympathy. Any one so far 
 from normal altruism must be either a pure egotist or a pure 
 tribalist. 
 
 Once a nation has attained freedom from alien coercion, 
 however, once it stands on a footing either of federation or , 
 of independence, there is little or nothing to be said for its 1 
 cultivation of the sentiment of race, from the point of view of 
 ethical reason.^ Nearly everything that has been said for it in 
 
 ^ It is very doubtful whether the Welsh Eisteddfod, though involving no 
 malevolent emotion, does not do more to retard than to promote Welsh 
 culture. It has indeed the advantage claimed for it of enabling all Welsh 
 people to meet on a common ground of feeling ; and in this way it probably 
 counteracts to some extent the bad effects of religion. But on the other 
 hand it tends to maintain complacency over a low standard of achievement. 
 Educated Welshmen have often pointed out (what might almost have been 
 assumed a priori) that the poetry of the prize odes has no literary value ; and 
 a careful musical critic of the last Eisteddfod protests that even on the musical 
 side — that which most interests the great majority of the audience, — there are 
 small signs of progressive culture, the prize cantatas being " musical drivel," 
 though the Welsh voices are often good. It is true that Professor Rhys has 
 noted, as a remarkable advance on previous years, that out of five competition 
 
Il8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 modern times is either a display of mental confusion or a brazen 
 pursuit of declamation. Mr Ruskin has protested that all good 
 art, whether of colour or speech, is redolent of its birthplace. If 
 so, there can be no fear of hurting it by teaching the artist to 
 recognise that all birthplaces are in the terms of the case of equal 
 virtue for those born in them. And if it be good to think of 
 oneself as one of a small group of brothers, there can be nothing 
 but good in feeling brotherhood for all civilised men. It is a 
 childish fallacy to identify cosmopolitanism with egotism. There 
 are egotists in every tribe, in every community : it is they and 
 they only who are egotists abroad. 
 
 In its commonest form, patriotism so-called is so far from 
 being a substantially beneficent emotion that it flourishes 
 most rankly alongside of malignant emotion towards even fellow- 
 citizens. The Englishman who is most vaporous of enmity 
 towards foreign races is commonly he who is most ready to break 
 English heads on a point of domestic strife. And the way in 
 which national aggregates of mankind, themselves divided by a 
 hundred enmities of interest and bias, are yet chronically unified 
 for the most part in temper, and sometimes in action, by the 
 breath of a common fury towards some other aggregate — this is 
 one of the most sombre aspects of civilised life. In every great 
 State in the world, there are marked divisions of class jealousy 
 and party animosity, over and above the infinity of individual 
 hostilities which constitute the physical and moral struggle for 
 existence. And yet in each State there are multitudes who, either 
 sinking for the moment the smaller passions in the greater or 
 caring only to gratify each as it is aroused, will at a word shout 
 insult and furious menace at some other State whose ofificial head 
 commits an indiscretion, or whose official underlings commit an 
 offence. Within a year we have seen the press of the four or 
 five most civilised countries in the world braying hoarse hatred 
 from each against some of the others. The psychological process 
 is absurdly primitive. For perhaps the bulk of political French- 
 men, Germans, and Americans, there is an imaginary entity, 
 " England," which is guilty of all the misdeeds of all Englishmen 
 in international life, and which is always plotting treasons, strat- 
 agems, and spoils. And while in England we are normally 
 aware of being divided into parties bent determinedly on frustrat- 
 
 essays on the Welsh language, three were sanely scientific. This, however, is 
 a development that has very little to do with the Eisteddfod as an institution. 
 Good may he done by the prizes for products of artistic handicraft ; but that 
 kind of influence need not be provincial. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. II9 
 
 ing each other's poHcy and ideals, we in turn are capable of setting 
 up for ourselves an imaginary entity, " England," which is but an 
 abstraction of the military power of the community, exercised 
 with the presumed approval of the majority. Both abstractions 
 are about as far from the reality as is an average Chinaman's 
 notion of European character. At the same time we preposter- 
 ously conceive of an entity "France " and of an entity "Germany," 
 each actuated by a single or corporate volition, presenting no trace 
 of the conflict of parties which we normally know to go on in 
 France and Germany. It is the same with each of the other 
 nations in turn. Most Americans individually answer proudly for 
 the other sixty millions as " we," though " we " are honeycombed 
 like the other " we's " with clashing interests and political ani- 
 mosities ; the farmers of the West protesting that they are ruined 
 by the East, and the clamourers for war with England being told 
 by fellow-countrymen that they are ignorant blunderers. France, 
 full of intense partisan hatreds, becomes la patrie in a flash of 
 hysteria at the thought of the German ; and the average French- 
 man cherishes a besotted vision of an entity " Russia " which is 
 France's friend, because the average Russian also hates Germany ; 
 when all the while the populations of both Germany and England 
 have a hundredfold more of the realities of ethical life in common 
 with the people of France than has the bureaucratic world which 
 is the main political actuality behind "Russia." It seems as if, 
 throughout the ages, men must needs grow inebriate of one lying 
 formula after another ; and that when religious superstitions cease 
 to be pretexts for systematic war, political superstitions suffice to 
 play the same part. 
 
 Some of the manifestations of the sentiment of race by bodies 
 of grown men are so absolutely on a level with the doings of 
 schoolboys, and some are so absolutely on a level with the doings 
 of barbarians, that they almost seem to negate the notion of 
 political evolution. When, some years ago, an American horse 
 won in an English horse-race, the entire New York Stock Ex- 
 change was reported to have burst into long-continued transports 
 of cheering. One hesitates to think what greeting would meet 
 any man asking the assembly in question to perform collectively 
 any act for the good of the community — beyond perhaps sub- 
 scribing towards the relief of some flagrant public distress. Most 
 of the members, probably, would not have a twinge of conscience 
 about an operation in shares which would beggar thousands of 
 their countrymen, and take the bread from the mouths of their 
 colleagues' children. But they were unfeignedly ecstatic over the 
 
I20 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 superior speed of a horse that happened to have been foaled in 
 the North American continent ; and if frog-jumping happened to 
 be the modish sport rather than horse-racing they would doubt- 
 less be as ecstatic in the case of an American success in that line. 
 
 In England more recently we have had an exhibition of cog- 
 nate feeling of which the model is to be looked for rather in a 
 palaver of redskins than in the school-playground. The Minister 
 for the Colonies, speaking at a Conservative reunion shortly after 
 the Teutonic Kaiser had with characteristic judgment interposed 
 in the trouble set up by local English aggression on the Transvaal 
 — always so-called Teutons embroiling themselves with Teutons — 
 the English Minister at this juncture thought fit, instead of 
 seeking to allay foolish irritation with words of common sense, 
 to declaim to his after-dinner audience the assurance that under 
 no circumstances should "we" permit foreign interference — in 
 respect of our interference with foreigners. Whereupon the entire 
 audience, the reports say, spontaneously rose to their feet, shouting 
 their applause, waving their handkerchiefs, and emptying their 
 glasses. And these sober-sided gentlemen, with their spokesman, 
 are of those who inform us that the Celtic race, lacking self-con- 
 trol, is incapable of self-government, and likely to do ill by the 
 strangers within its gates. The critics in question have since 
 exhibited themselves to the world as the brazen defenders of the 
 act of brigandage which gave rise to the whole outbreak of ill-will 
 between the nominal head-centres of Teutonia — London shouting 
 Billingsgate at Berlin, and Berlin bellowing insult back. The 
 defenders of the piratical raid on the Transvaal, be it observed, 
 prosers and poets alike, are those who asperse as " rebels " the 
 Irishmen who constitutionally demand Home Rule for Ireland ; 
 and if the clash of German with English braggadocio had led 
 to a pan-Teutonic war, the Teuton-hating Teutons of England 
 would have expected the Celtic " rebels " to fight by their side — 
 or, to put it more exactly, would have expected Irishmen to go 
 and fight for them. Such are the consistencies of race-sentiment. 
 
 When one remembers the internecine conflict that in every 
 case is proceeding behind the parade of national flags, the cries 
 which pass between the aggregates seem to yield a ring of 
 hideous irony, as of the mirth of madmen behind their bars. 
 Everywhere there is the mining war of classes, the inner corrosion 
 of penury and the rage of despair, the clamorous appeal from the 
 sufferers for permanent succour, the futile paltering of a few in 
 the attempt to give it, the hard refusal of the rest ; and over all 
 sound the cries of protested national unity, the roar of animal 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. 121 
 
 pride and hate which outpeals the cry of pain. Everywhere 
 distress and social disease, everywhere the mutual exasperation of 
 factions, everywhere reciprocal disbelief, everywhere " a paste- 
 board portico without, and a deliquium of deadly weakness 
 within." 
 
 It would be inconceivable that all this should long subsist, were 
 it not that it has so long subsisted. We are all so constantly 
 criticising each other within our own frontiers, demonstrating 
 the imbecility of some and the baseness of others, one half of the 
 electorate crying shame on the other half as a medley of knaves 
 and fools, that it seems psychologically impossible that we 
 should ever get into the attitude of putting our race collectively 
 in the right and another race collectively in the wrong. We 
 realise on one day that many Germans are wiser than many 
 English, and on another day that many French are more 
 civilised than many Australians or Americans : certain move- 
 ments, certain ideals draw sections of all races into fraternity ; 
 and there is hardly a citizen, however Httle-travelled, who has 
 not met some member of an alien race whom he likes and 
 esteems. Yet all the aggregates alike seem capable of drowning 
 all such reminiscence in a flood of such instinct as hurled at 
 each other's throats the " dragons of the earlier prime." 
 
 As regards the disputes of man and man, there are outsiders 
 who can sit in judgment : even recrimination may at times have 
 the effect of reminding a disputant that he has not done as he 
 demands to be done by. But in the hatreds and strifes of 
 nations, each side seems to forget all its sins and think only of 
 its wrongs — each side's combatants, that is, for in every war there 
 are some who condemn their own nation. Much has been made, 
 and is still made, in the United States, of the amount of sym- 
 pathy shown by many of the upper classes in England with the 
 South during the Civil War, and of the lack of any sort of 
 sympathy with either side, or with the people of the States as a 
 whole, on the part of many other Englishmen. Yet any con- 
 sultation of current American literature before the war will reveal 
 that, whatever might be the weight of English opinion and 
 English models in some spheres of American life, there was in 
 others an enormous amount of crude vituperation of all things 
 iMiglish. Such vituperation, which was often far more virulent 
 than the inconsiderate criticism of American life by English 
 travellers, naturally set up ill-will among many of those abused ; 
 but w'hen the war came, many American patriots were unfeignedly 
 indignant that " Enuland " for a time showed so litde fellow- 
 
122 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 feeling. We are all so ready to forget our past blows in the 
 thrill of our tingling perception of our present hurts. The new 
 nations seem in this respect no wiser than the old. The late 
 Mr Lowell, in his early and angry essay " On a Certain Conde- 
 scension in Foreigners," exhibited the latter form of sensation 
 with much energy ; but it will not be found that Mr Lowell in any 
 of his works, early or late, ever forbore a good opportunity to treat 
 other nationalities with the simple-minded condescension of race 
 which so exasperated him when flaunted by obtuse Englishmen. 
 Be it over German clumsiness, or French flashiness, or Scotch 
 unattractiveness, the good gentleman's humour and good humour 
 are one when he can make play against another community as 
 others had made play against his. And his example is freely 
 followed among his countrymen. That some of them have sold 
 Remington rifles to Turks wherewith to repel Russians, and 
 military stores to Cuban insurrectionists wherewith to baffle 
 Spain, — all this is not felt to be a reason for regarding the 
 outfitting of the Alabama in England as a similar commercial 
 transaction. Despite the compensation which followed, the 
 original offence, with many another, is still scored by many 
 to the general account of the entity " England." As a matter 
 of fact, there were many sympathisers with the South in the 
 Northern States, as there were " loyalists " in the Southern ; ^ 
 but these things are forgotten in the ethical convenience of 
 settling all accounts by imputing wrong-doing in the lump to 
 another nation in the lump. Thus Mr Howells, privately one 
 of the most amiable of men, seems quite serious at times — as 
 serious as Mr Marion Crawford — in representing Englishmen in 
 general and in particular as without exception detestable.- Some 
 offence personally received, or some offensive English action or 
 utterance concerning Americans, has apparently sufficed these 
 amateur sociologists as ground for furious indictments of a whole 
 nation. 
 
 When men who, albeit of the irritable genus, are vowed to 
 peaceful pursuits, thus lend themselves to the spirit of national 
 malice, it is a matter of course that nations in the lump, or the 
 bellicose sections of nations, should hold themselves as always 
 
 ^ Compare Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect, Glasgow ed., 1883, 
 pp. 258-261, and an article England and America in 1S63, in Harpers 
 Magazine, May 1896, p. 847. 
 
 - Readers of Mr Howells' novel, A Fearful Responsibility, and of Mr 
 Crawford's romance, I\lr Isaacs, will remember the passages in point. 
 
THE QUESTION OF RACE. I23 
 
 the wronged and never the wrongers in war, every citizen being 
 primed in such views by the lamentable compositions employed 
 everywhere as manuals of history in the common schools. The 
 German people have been taught for eighty years to exult over 
 their old War of Liberation — liberation from the French invader 
 — with no thought of the fact that wanton German invasion of 
 France had been the beginning of that particular strife, and 
 indeed one of the determining circumstances which led to the 
 rise of Napoleon. In the same way the French people in the 
 mass ^ are taught to hold their nation wronged by England and 
 by Germany, even as the English schoolboy is taught to regard 
 France as the aggressive enemy of England in the modern period, 
 yet at the same time to take satisfaction in the wanton invasions 
 of France by the older kings of England. Everywhere reflection 
 is made to subserve one of the worst instinctive lusts of the 
 animal man. 
 
 With such an infinite heritage of strife in all our veins, it 
 would indeed be visionary to preach an ideal of absolute strife- 
 lessness, of all-embracing goodwill. The religion which specially 
 claims to expound the principle of mutual love has been in 
 practice but a new pretext for enmity. I have seen a programme 
 of a " Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour " where, 
 under the device of Christian solidarity, the members of groups 
 are counselled among other things to develop the instinct of 
 " loyalty " to their own particular church. A text for the theme 
 is duly supplied.- The average man can come no nearer than 
 that to a general philanthropism. Even the political movement 
 which can claim to be creating a new hope for the ending of 
 the reign of militarism by founding itself on the community of 
 interest between the workers of all nations — even scientific 
 Socialism is the organisation of world-wide strife between the 
 working-class and its exploiters ; while the Socialism of the 
 streets is too often a grim gospel of hate. But at least we can 
 hope for the continuous transformation of strife from an animal 
 
 ^ The present opportunity may he taken to note with satisfaction and with 
 praise the efforts of M. Robin, so long director of the Prevost Orphanage at 
 Cempuis, to substitute a sane and civilised teaching in these matters for what 
 is normally given. M. Robin has had his reward in being deprived of his 
 post and vilified alike by pietists and pagans in the French press, but his 
 record will not be forgotten nor his example let pass into oblivion. 
 
 ^ Psalm Ixxxiv. 1-12. "A review of the history of your own denomination " 
 is the suggested exercise. 
 
124 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 energy, so to speak, to an energy of the reason ; a continuous 
 shifting of the grounds of hostility from primary passions to 
 purified ideals, from the {)lane of barbarism to the plane of 
 intelligence. And it is because the prejudice of race, with all 
 its cargo of historical fallacy and political iniquity, is just an 
 energy of mere animal passion, surviving unpurified from the 
 stage of sheer barbarism, that it is here impugned. 
 
II. 
 
 THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 § I. The Causafiofi of the Past. 
 
 We have already seen enough to satisfy us that at the dawn of 
 history there was no " Irish race " in the special sense, no 
 specific type of human being, whether " Celtic " or " Iberian " 
 or " Ligurian " or " Silurian " or " Lappanoid," or " Teutonic,"^ 
 constituting a main part of the Irish population. In Ireland, 
 as nearly everywhere else in the scope of our survey, there had 
 been wave on wave of immigration, whether of " pure " or of 
 " mixed " races ; and in the earliest literature we find abundant 
 record of golden-haired as well as of dark-haired people. And 
 though these data are not proofs of difference of stock, there are 
 other reasons -"^ for believing that among the groups in question 
 there were tribes of " Teutonic " kinship as w'ell as tribes of 
 " Celts." We may at least be sure that in prehistoric Ireland 
 there had occurred a mixture of inhabitants very much like what 
 has occurred in historic Ireland, where we note the successive 
 addition of Danes, Anglo - Normans, Elizabethan English, 
 Cromwellian English, and Lowland Scotch to the previous 
 blend. If then we are ever to explain the course of Irish 
 history, and any broad peculiarities which may exist in modern 
 Irish character, it must be a posteriori and not a priori — from 
 conditions and not from first causes. It is sufficiently idle to 
 set up race character in any case as an explanation of national 
 facts ; but it is worse than idle to do so when the race is 
 admittedly a medley of many stocks. At this day, though one 
 or two types of face are generally recognised among us as Irish, 
 because apparently much less common outside of Ireland, there 
 is no general Irish type^ whether as regards skull, hair, skin, 
 
 ^ Penka {Herktinft der Arier, S. 174) sees evidence in Irish tradition for the 
 view that the Gael came from Scandinavia. 
 
 - "The ' macrognathism ' [largeness of jaw] . . . popularly supposed to be 
 characteristic of the Irish face, and always appearing in the Irishmen of 
 
 12s 
 
126 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 eyes, or stature, save in so far as we find there, as in England 
 and Scotland, a majority of dark or hrown-hatred people. The 
 common notion that Irishmen are mostly dark-cjW is an error. 
 " It is a curious and suggestive fact," says Dr Beddoe, " — sugges- 
 tive of the worthlessness of unsystematic observation and hasty 
 generalisation — that the Irish are very frequently spoken of as 
 a dark-eyed race ; whereas the preponderance of light eyes (grey, 
 blue, or bluish grey, often with a narrow dark rim round the 
 iris), is very decided, and obtains without a single exception in 
 all the forty or fifty localities where I have made observations. 
 Sir W. Wilde, dealing with people from all parts of Ireland, but 
 in larger proportion from Dublin and its neighbourhood, found 
 in 1 1 30 the following proportions: — blue eyes, 34*1 per cent.; 
 grey eyes, 54*6 ; hazel eyes, 2*4; and brown eyes, 8"8 per cent." ^ 
 And this is further confirmed by a German anthropologist already 
 cited. "We constantly meet," says Herr Poesche, "the notion 
 that the Irish in general have dark eyes. In reality there are 
 among them relatively fewer dark-eyed people than among the 
 English and the German. Probably 90 per cent, of the Irish 
 have blue-grey eyes. On the other hand they are in general less 
 blond than the Germans and the English, as one can readily see 
 by the children." - Further, the average stature of Irishmen is 
 greater than that of Englishmen.^ We can thus find in Ireland 
 no general type answering either to the Celtic or the Ligurian or 
 
 English caricature, is really not common in the Irish, although very common 
 in the lower type of Scotch face" (Richey, Short History of the Irish People, 
 p. 27, notes). 
 
 ^ Art. The Kelts of Ireland, mjottriial of Anthropology, Oct. 1870, p. 119. 
 Cp. Dr Beddoe's article in the Me»ioirs of the Anthropological Society, vol. 
 ii., 1866, p. 43, where he notes the dark eyes of the Welsh as distinguishing 
 them from the Irish. 
 
 2 Die Arier, S. 24. Herr Poesche falls into an error, or at least a laxity of 
 terms, when he asserts that "Holland, England, and Scotland are predomi- 
 nantly blond." This is not true as regards England and Scotland unless we 
 reckon as "blond" many brown-haired people. Blonds proper are certainly 
 in a minority in England and Scotland ; and Herr Poesche in another part of 
 his book cites a letter from a Scotchman pointing this out. On the other 
 hand, I have observed in Celtic-speaking Wales a great predominance of 
 semi-blonds and dun-haired people over the black-haired. At an Eisteddfod 
 one sees four or five of the medium type for one distinctly dark, and about 
 as many blonds or red-haired as black-haired. The latter are said to pre- 
 ponderate in Denbighshire. (Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 68.) Person- 
 ally, I have not noticed there any sucli preponderance. 
 
 ^ In the far west of Kerry, commonly held to be peopled by an " Iberian " 
 type, Dr Beddoe found the stature high (as first cited, p. 121). 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 127 
 
 the Iberian or the Scandinavian, as described by the anthro- 
 pologists.^ And while there seems to have been one " Celtic " 
 language spoken throughout Ireland at the beginning of the 
 historic period, it is quite impossible to decide whether this 
 language " originated " with dark or fair or tall or short or broad- 
 headed or narrow-headed people, or with very early inhabitants 
 or with later. 
 
 What we do seem to find, about a thousand years ago, is the 
 debris of a measure of civilisation which on some sides compares 
 rather remarkably with those of contemporary northern Europe, 
 apart from Wales. The Irish, like the Welsh, seem to have 
 cultivated the intelligence, or more strictly the imagination, on 
 the side of literature and song, much more extensively than had 
 been done by the then inhabitants of England or of Germany.- 
 If we proceeded on assumptions of inherent racial tendencies, 
 we should be led to decide, accordingly, that the peoples speak- 
 ing the Celtic languages have an innate or racial aesthetic bent ^ 
 which is lacking in some of the peoples speaking the Teutonic 
 languages. It seems to be among the races who existed in 
 northern and southern France at the beginning of our era — 
 among them or their presumed kindred — that there arose in 
 modern Europe the faculty for and the practice of imaginative 
 literature on the plane of the adult intelligence. Northern and 
 Southern French poets — trouveres and troubadours — and Welsh 
 and Irish bards, were practically the first representatives, in the 
 modern period, of the force which did more than any other to 
 lift semi-civilised life above the mortal monotony that in times of 
 semi-civilisation, as of barbarism, is one of the main provoca- 
 tives to war. If gifts of " races " to civilisation are to be 
 
 ^ Cp. Dr Beddoe as first cited, pp. 127-131. 
 
 "^ " It may be said that the two oldest collections of secular Irish literature 
 which Dublin possesses, \he Leabar nah hUidhre and the Book of Leinster, 
 (end of nth and middle of 12th century) are 'collections of the debris of a 
 rich manuscript literature which has been destroyed with the monasteries by 
 the invasions of the Northmen, in the ninth and tenth centuries.' The two 
 collections contain many pieces composed before these invasions ; and even in 
 MSS. of the 14th, 15th, and i6th centuries, literary works antedating the 
 9th century are found in abundance. One cannot otherwise explain the jDer- 
 sistence with which these MSS. conserve, in a multitude of words, letters 
 which had ceased to be pronounced at the time of last writing." (D'Arbois 
 de Jubainville, Introduction d r^tude de la litt^rattire celtique, 1883, pp. 382- 
 383, citing Zimmer, Keltische Stiidien, Heft I. pp. 26, 28.) 
 
 •* Mr Elton [Origins of English History, 2nd ed. p. iii.) cites ancient testi- 
 monies going to show that the ancient Gauls had tartans. 
 
128 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 posited, this is a gift of which it would not be easy to speak 
 too highly. 
 
 To attribute, however, a special faculty to a race because its 
 members were forward in showing that faculty, is only to repeat 
 the fallacy of race prejudice on the positive side. If the so-called 
 Celtic peoples developed humanist poetry and secular fiction 
 before some of the so-called Teutonic peoples, it must have been 
 in virtue of certain institutions, which may or may not have been 
 set up with the conscious purpose of promoting the ends which 
 they finally served. When the Romans created annual consuls, 
 it was not with the knowledge that that was the best available 
 plan to evoke the maximum of the military faculty in the State, 
 and to breed a caste of captains. These results were secured 
 incidentally, the design being simply to check the engrossing of 
 power. So, among the peoples of France and Wales and Ireland, 
 it cannot be supposed that there was any early determination to 
 promote poetry. What seems to have happened in France and 
 Wales is, first, the development of the Druid order (above con- 
 sidered), and later the gradual transformation of that order, 
 especially after the coming of Christianity, into an order of 
 bards. ^ The Germans were no more racially incapable of such 
 a development than the Norsemen, who to some extent paralleled 
 it : they simply did not come so early under the conditions 
 essential to such a development. We know from Tacitus that 
 they had a habit of singing a chant before battle — a chant which 
 he says they called the barditus. There was there the germ of 
 a bardic system ; perhaps a form of the very word. Only there 
 lacked the conditions and influences which could readily fecun- 
 date the germ — among the first of these being the use of letters, 
 which reached Gallia and Britain through Marseilles, and possibly 
 through Carthaginian commerce, while Germany was still untra- 
 versed by civilised men. 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, there has been among us much 
 less of anti-Teutonic than of anti-Celtic apriorism, even in this 
 connection ; and the sociological truth in the matter may be 
 brought out by following up the anti-Celtic view as it is indicated 
 by the late Mr Russell Lowell in his Letters. Mr Lowell, being 
 of opinion that M. Littre had in some of his writings'- allowed 
 
 1 Diodorus Siculus (v. 31) mentions "bards" in addition to priests among 
 the Gain. 
 
 - I cannot recall any passage in Littre which seems to me to give occasion 
 for such a criticism. It is true that he combated the view, which Mr Lowell 
 seems to have adopted, that early French represents the contact of the 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 29 
 
 too much credit to the Celtic element in early French literature, 
 protested that " As for the Kelts, there is no early French litera- 
 ture of any value in which the Teutonic blood did not supply 
 t\\Qfo?id. The history of the language proves it, if nothing else 
 did." Now, the history of a language simply can7wt prove such 
 a proposition as is here laid down. Nothing could prove it save 
 an amount and a kind of biographical evidence which in the 
 nature of the case does not exist. The fo7id of Mr Lowell's 
 doctrine is visibly his own raw race-prejudice, which reveals 
 itself crudely enough in his further self-confounding confession : 
 " I like Man better than I do any special variety of man — and 
 I think the Keltic variety one of the poorest."^ Mr Lowell indeed 
 put his case in the weakest way he well could when he staked 
 it on the ground of linguistics. A Teutonic basis for the early 
 French literature could be much more plausibly argued on the 
 score of the Teutonic matter of the Chanson de Roland, for 
 instance, than on the score of any Teutonic elements in its 
 language. The fact of the language being so definitely Romance 
 must surely tell in favour of the Gallic culture force. As regards 
 the Teutonic matter in the epos, however, the answer is that, 
 inasmuch as the " Teutonic blood " had in its original environ- 
 ment produced nothing even remotely approaching the Chanson 
 de Roland, whatever share it had in the new literary growth was 
 absolutely conditioned by the new environment, which must 
 receive an equal credit, if the apportioning of racial credit is to 
 be the business of either literary or sociological criticism. The 
 true and scientific conclusion, surely, here as elsewhere, is that 
 the crossing of stocks, of temperaments, of cultures, yielded a 
 result far superior to what was possible for either side without it. 
 Without the " Teutonic blood," probably, the new literary growth 
 had not arisen ; but it is quite clear that it could not have arisen 
 in a purely Teutonic sphere. 
 
 Germanic invaders with the Latin language (Hisloire de la langiie francaise, 
 edit. 1863, i. 102-104). Littre showed that there is no evidence of any pre- 
 ponderating Germanic influence, and insisted further on the numerical small- 
 nessofthe invading element. But on the other hand he noted as distinctly 
 (ii. 104) that the old Celtic counted for as little in determining the new 
 speech. In his essay on the Nouvelle Exdgese de Shakspere, again (a review 
 of the English book so entitled), he sets his face against a number of the pro- 
 Celtic assumptions of his author {Litteratitre et Histoire, 1875, pp. 96-98, 
 &c.) ; and he is equally judicial in his estimate of the elements which went to 
 the building up of modern European civilisation (for instance, in the Etudes 
 sur les barbarcs et le moyen age, 3e edit., pp. 84-92, 124-136). 
 ^ Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 442-443. 
 
 I 
 
130 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 It used to be assumed that in the earlier Scandinavian litera- 
 ture the " Teutonic genius " had exhibited its innate and inde- 
 pendent literary bent, though the mere fact that the gift had been 
 exhibited only in the northern branch of the supposed homo- 
 geneous stock, leaving the southern to develop it much later by 
 imitation, might be supposed to discredit the racial thesis in 
 advance. But we now know that the Eddas, like other parts of 
 the old Scandinavian literature, have been antedated alike as 
 regards form ^ and matter. Much of the Scandinavian mythology 
 is now held to have had a post-Christian origin ; and the Eddas 
 in particular are found to show a marked foreign influence. And 
 that influence, notably enough, appears to be " Celtic." The 
 Eddas are now dated between 800 and 11 00; and their latest 
 expositors hold them to have been composed, albeit by Norse- 
 men, within the culture-sphere of Ireland. 
 
 "Where . . . shall we find a place to which the conditions of life 
 depicted in the poem shall apply — a temperate country, with Kelts in 
 or near it, with a certain amount of civihsation and refinement and 
 foreign trade, with Christian influences, with woods and deer and 
 forest trees, with a fine coast and islands, where there were fortified 
 places, where there was plenty of rich embroidered tapestry ; where 
 hunting, hawking, bird-clubbing went on as common pastimes, where 
 slavery was widely prevalent (the slaves being often of a different 
 racial type to their masters), where harping and carping went on in 
 the hall to the merry clink of cup and can kept filled with beer and 
 wine, where there was plenty of ' Welsh ' cloth, ' Welsh ' gold and 
 ' Welsh ' steel, where the Scandinavians led a roving life, fighting and 
 sailing, and riding and feasting, by turns ? Where but in the Western 
 Isles? 
 
 "Again, where could those curious mythologic fancies, which created 
 Walhall, and made of Woden a heavenly Charlemagne, which 
 dreamed, like Caedmon, of the Rood as a tree that spread through 
 the worlds, which pictured the final doom as near, and nursed visions 
 of an everlasting peace, holier even than Cynewulf's Phoenix figures — 
 where could such ideas as these, alien as they are to the old Teutonic 
 religion and ritual and thought, have been better fostered than in the 
 British Isles, at a time when the Irish Church, with her fervent faith 
 
 ^ " Down to the present century, and far into it, the most extravagant views 
 were held with regard to the ' Eddie poems.' . . . Even Grimm placed them 
 long before Charles the Great. These opinions, however, a careful examina- 
 tion of the poems will show to be untenable, and the positive evidence of 
 language proves them to be absolutely mistaken." (Vigfusson and Powell, 
 Corpus Pocticutn Borealc, 18S3, Introd., Vol. i., p. Ivii.) 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 131 
 
 . . . and curious lialf-Eastern legends, was impressing the poetic 
 mind on one side, while the rich and splendid court of Eadgar or 
 Canute would stimulate it on the other ?"^ 
 
 If then even the early Scandinavian poetry itself owes its 
 generation in part to Celtic contacts, it is an act of the merest 
 partisanship to credit in mass the early literature of France, 
 in a non-Teutonic tongue, to the " Teutonic blood " of the 
 Frankish invaders who had so speedily adopted the tongue of 
 the native majority. When the dogmas of blondness and dolicho- 
 cephalism have collapsed, the dogma of " blood " must share 
 their fate. We may certainly decide that any one stock may 
 profitably be crossed with any other in the same or a similar 
 culture-stage ; but it would be folly to credit to one stock, on 
 no substantive evidence, an innate literary endowment which we 
 finally do not allow even to a race which earlier gave proof of 
 literary faculty. To this attitude we return. What we have to 
 do with regard to the early literature of Ireland, bardic and 
 legalist, is just to accept the phenomenon for what it is. There 
 is a danger of over-estimating the importance of the proto- 
 civilisation of Ireland in itself, 'as apart from the developments 
 which we have above assumed to have followed on such begin- 
 nings. Primeval bardism was certainly not a force that could 
 constitute a civilisation even remotely comparable to those of the 
 Mediterranean world. It was simply an intellectual nucleus,- 
 which new culture forces could advantageously fructify. And 
 when Christianity arrived, though of course it was a culture force 
 of no lasting value, the efficacy of the nucleus was at once seen 
 in the extraordinary development of Christian propaganda which 
 followed. The facts of the zealous cultivation of Christian letters 
 in Ireland in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, and of the 
 spread of Christian teaching thence by Irish missionaries and 
 pupils of Irish schools, are indisputable and undisputed. What 
 is urged by the critics of Irish claims is that this phase of 
 civilisation was not progressive or permanent ; that, apart from 
 any interference by England, the proto-civilisation of Ireland 
 either stagnated or succumbed to the shock of the Danish 
 irruption of the ninth century ; and that if it so succumbed it 
 cannot be held to have had any great inherent vigour. To 
 which we answer, Exactly so. The mediaeval civilisation of 
 
 ^ Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Pocticiim Boreale, Vol. i., Introd., pp. 
 Ixii.-lxiii. 
 
 - I say nothing here on ihe dis]>med question of early Irish decorative art, 
 on which I have reached no decided opinions. 
 
132 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Ireland, like the civilisation of Anglo-Saxon England, was in- 
 capable of progress beyond a certain point in the absence of 
 certain political conditions and certain fresh outside influences. 
 The course of things proved clearly enough how weak a civilising 
 force is mere " Christianity." ^ Indeed, save in so far as the 
 conflicting ethics of ancient Syria may be higher than that of an 
 unciviHsed race to which it is communicated, mere Christian 
 doctrine is not a civilising agent at all ; and it is quite conceiv- 
 able that but for outside influences the early Irish and the Anglo- 
 Saxons might have remained absolutely unprogressive at the 
 intellectual and artistic level of the ninth century. Christianity 
 can subsist fixedly at the level of semi-barbarism, just as it can 
 at the level of a negro camp-meeting. The determining forces 
 of Christian civilisation, so-called, have really been quite apart 
 from the Christian religion, consisting as they did (i) among the 
 early Irish and English in the study of language and the practice 
 of letters which the use of the Christian literature involved, and 
 (2) since then in the successive acquisition of non-Christian 
 literary and scientific ideas, by way of fresh contact with ancient 
 literature and Saracen science, and of the cumulative process of 
 thought and discovery following on these impulses. 
 
 Christian Ireland then might well stagnate as did Christian 
 England, in the absence of fresh contact with the progressive life 
 of the Continent. The fatality of the Christian influence, in a 
 primitive community where the Christian doctrines are really 
 believed in, is that in time it positively unfits the people for self- 
 defence against barbarian enemies. Thus the Anglo-Saxons and 
 the Franks and the Irish alike seem to have grown collectively 
 timorous as they grew Christian, the later Teutons being glad to 
 buy off menacing Danes and Norsemen with tribute, while the 
 Irish, though never overrun by the Danes as were the Saxons, 
 were long incapable of making headway against them. Chris- 
 tianity, of course, did nothing to unite the tribes — less, apparently, 
 than Druidism had done in Gaul ; and there was enough in- 
 
 ' The Duke of Argyll, while insisting on the "utter sterility of the Celtic 
 Church as regards any good influence on the economic condition, or on the 
 social state, or on the political organisation of the people," sets down the 
 failure to Celticity. "The Celtic Church carried in its hands, indeed, the 
 precious seed of Christian belief. But it carried that seed in the most earthy 
 of all earthen vessels" {Irish Naiionalisni, ^^. 16, 17). The metaphor here 
 is obscure, but the passage at least plainly implies that it is not in the "seed " 
 but in the " hands " or the " vessel " that the civilising force lies. That is to 
 say, the creed in itself is impotent. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 33 
 
 ternecine war to arrest civilisation had the Danes never appeared. 
 On the other hand, the Danish civilisation being higher on its 
 commercial side than the Irish, the Danish contact, but for its 
 disastrous effect on literature, might even have been a civilising 
 agency. In so far, then, as the case of " Ireland versus England " 
 takes the shape of a claim on the Irish side that England de- 
 stroyed a pre-existent Irish civilisation, it must be disallowed. 
 The Irish tribes in the eleventh century had at last worsted the 
 Danes, without showing any gain from the Danish influence ; 
 while on the other hand the Danes had almost destroyed the old 
 germs of culture. It was not England that wrought the havoc.^ 
 The valid statement of the case is something very different. 
 What Ireland needed for development was peaceful contact with 
 European civilisation. What occurred instead was mere oppres- 
 sive and maleficent interference on the part of England, whose 
 rulers were at once unable so to conquer Ireland as to assimilate 
 its polity to theirs ; unfit so to administer law as to exert a moral 
 
 ^ The Duke of Argyll, rebutting the claims made for the early Christian 
 civilisation of Ireland, has insisted that the heathen Danes were much more 
 civilised than the Christian Irish. Coming from a Christian polemist, the 
 proposition has weight ; but it is nevertheless probably overcharged. Says 
 the Duke: — "It is literally true that the heathen Danes, who began their 
 invasions of Ireland in the year a.d. 795, and were finally defeated in 1014, 
 did more, during these two hundred and nineteen years, to establish the 
 beginnings of commerce, of wealth, and of the civilisation which depends on 
 these, than the Celtic Church or people did during all the centuries of their 
 previous, or of their subsequent and separate existence" {Irish Nationalism, 
 pp. 17-18). Granted that the Christian Church did little, it cannot be made 
 out that the Danes did much more. The Duke carefully cites Professor 
 Richey as to the superior building of the Danish cities, which were fortified 
 places ; but he entirely ignores the following verdicts by the same authority : — 
 " Little plunder could be obtained from the Celtic inhabitants, and the efforts 
 of the [Danish] invaders were, therefore, directed against the ecclesiastical 
 establishments. The monastery of Armagh was rebuilt ten times, and as often 
 destroyed. It was sacked three times in a month. The result of these con- 
 stant invasions was the extinction of the feeble sparks of civilisation which 
 had been kindled among the monks — the schools of learning were dispersed, 
 and the Celtic nation more disorganised than before " [Sliort History of the 
 Irish People, p. 108). "Their [the Danes'] civilisation was not conspicuously 
 superior to that of the natives. . . . All the circumstances which enabled the 
 colony of Marseilles to exercise so beneficial an influence in southern Oaul 
 were utterly wanting to the Danish trading towns" {Id., p. no). "No civil 
 wars could have produced the ruin and national and moral deterioration which 
 were the result of the first invasion and continued presence of ihe Danes" 
 {Id., p. 112). 
 
134 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 influence without a military ; and incapable of the wisdom or 
 
 generosity of leaving the Irish populations to their own devices. 
 
 It is not necessary to put the argument in the form of a charge 
 
 of premeditated wickedness against the successive rulers of 
 
 England, though it is important to remember that their doings 
 
 were very much on a par with those which many Englishmen 
 
 characterise as wicked in the case of foreign powers in modern 
 
 times. The Turkish Porte never misused opportunities more 
 
 ^ grossly, or maintained its authority with more heartless egoism, 
 
 than did the rulers of England in their dealings with Ireland during 
 
 five hundred years. But if we want simply to understand the 
 
 matter, instead of dealing out denunciation, which in such a case 
 
 y^ can now have little corrective value for anybody, it may suffice 
 
 \ to say that the relation set up between England and Ireland was 
 
 "X/ \v from the first an immense fatality, such as would have been 
 
 .'TV^I ruinous — and this is the great point to be enforced here — such 
 
 as would have been ruinous to the development of atiy civilisa- 
 
 tio7i and ajiy race whatever, placed as Ireland was. The business 
 
 r ~ of a rational historian to-day is not to convict dead Englishmen 
 
 I 1 of evil-doing, but to show living Englishmen how things worked 
 
 / 1 together for evil in Ireland under their ancestors, and how 
 
 ' Y impossible it is that things in Ireland should ever go well unless 
 
 they absolutely rise above their ancestors' point of view. 
 
 ^ What would conceivably have happened in Ireland but for 
 
 I inconclusive English interference, was the normal process of 
 
 r subjugation of warring septs by a ruler of military capacity. "^ 
 
 I There seems no other way by which a primitive pastoral and 
 
 \ hunting people, divided into hostile groups, can reach a pro- 
 
 I gressive state of peaceful agriculture and industry. Certainly 
 
 / the Irish population had taken a long time to approach the 
 
 ( solution. But the Anglo-Saxons had not reached it at the time 
 
 \ of the Norman Conquest, after five or six hundred years of 
 
 (_^ miserable experiment. In either case it could probably have 
 
 been reached only by way of conscious imitation of the doings 
 
 of more civilised rulers, and by employment of some of their 
 
 means, as the Teutonic leaders and kings were led to the idea 
 
 of empire by the spectacle of that of Rome. That the Irish 
 
 should not have spontaneously attained to the Roman solution 
 
 was clearly due to no special incapacity for it, but rather to the 
 
 fact of the natural difficulties in the way "' — difficulties which 
 
 ' Compare Hallam, Const. Hist., lolh ed. , iii. 348, 365 ; Lecky, History of 
 Ireland, i. 3, and Maine, Early History of Institutions, p. 54. 
 
 -' "Although compact in form, and nut intersected by mountain ranges of 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 35 
 
 cannot be said to have existed to anything like the same extent 
 in Anglo-Saxon England. To this day Ireland is a country not 
 easy to traverse, and in the days of enormous bogs and enormous 
 forests it was much worse. Even in the sixteenth century, the 
 English armies found it extremely hard to overrun. That a 
 native ruler or series of rulers, with no precedents to guide them, 
 should have kept such a land in steady subjection would have 
 been miraculous. But even as the much more physically-divided 
 Greece could at length be brought into subject unity, after ages 
 of division, by the advance of military and administrative skill, so 
 might Ireland have been, especially after the famous precedent 
 created by Brian. 
 
 In that way the mere example of the Norman Conquest of 
 England might very well have served to set up a definite 
 unifying movement in Ireland. If even the Norman Conquest 
 had effectively extended to Ireland, the fusion there could have 
 been at least as complete as in England. But what happened, 
 as everybody knows, was a process of merely partial interference, 
 which left Ireland always chained to England as it were by 
 one foot, unable to scramble to even such measure of equilibrium 
 as was attained in England and Scotland. Every possible ad- 
 justment was sure to be tripped up by a jerk of Englislv,^^ 
 intervention. For the English ruler, living out of touch with 
 the Irish population, never came to regard them as his fathers 
 had soon learned to regard the Saxon population of England 
 — as subjects and neighbours to be arranged with and to be 
 assimilated. This belonged to the physical circumstances. To 
 understand the relation between England and Ireland, it is 
 important to remember at all times the simple fact, that in 
 respect of difficulty of intercourse Irela?id is much fio'ther away 
 from E7igland fha?i France, and Dublin imich further away 
 from London than Paris. The " estranging sea," by rupturing 
 the tissue of contacts which means unity in a State as in an 
 organism, made it predestinately impossible that one pulse of 
 regular life should ever run from England to Ireland, even as 
 the same factor made it impossible that England should maintain 
 her later conquests in France. Even to-day the mere geo- 
 graphical aloofness of Ireland and England counts for a great 
 deal in limiting acquaintanceship ; and in days of scanty 
 
 unusual elevation, it [Ireland] is broken up inlo .se\eral distinct districts without 
 means of easy communication ; and its political divisions, and the fortune of 
 each of them, are clearly referable to physical conditions" (Richey, as cited, 
 p. II). 
 
136 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 na\igation it must have counted for much more. Added to 
 difference of language, it set the poUtics of the two countries, 
 under their single nominal king, fatally at variance ; and despite 
 some isolated steps towards statesman-like courses, the relation 
 settled down into one of cat and dog. This was recognised 
 by one of the English writers who began to consider the case 
 reasonably three hundred years ago. " It was manifest," says 
 Sir John Davies, the Attorney-General of James I. for Ireland, 
 in his Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland ivas 7iever 
 entirely subdued (16 12) — "It was manifest that such as had 
 the government of Ireland under the crown of England did 
 intend to make a perpetual separation and enmity between the 
 English and Irish, pretending, no doubt, that the English should 
 in the end root out the Irish." But as the sentiment of race 
 hostility is essentially unintelligent, it needs not, to feed upon, 
 any real difference of heredity — not even, as later history shows, 
 the real distinction set up by difference of language. It was 
 doubly impossible to "root out the Irish," because the simple 
 factors of remoteness and separateness at once began to raise 
 up new " Irish " in the persons of the English settled in Ireland. 
 Indeed we may say with perfect confidence that // /;/ the twelfth 
 century all the native Irish had been utterly exterminated, the 
 '■'■Irish trouble" ivould in great measicre have afterguards gone on 
 just as it has done. That the English conquerors, once settled 
 in Ireland, became " more Irish than the Irish themselves," is 
 one of the commonplaces of British history. In virtue of being 
 a commonplace it has of course never availed to check the habit 
 of generalising on " the Irish character " and " the Celt ; " though 
 it at once convicts all such generalisations of nonsense. 
 
 It is indeed a great lesson on the real forces of universal 
 politics, to realise how the blind egoism of the Norman con- 
 querors to begin with, and of the English governments in later 
 ages, turned to naught the very aspirations that moved them. In 
 England there was gradually wrought an immense compromise — 
 the adoption by the conquerors of the language of the conquered, 
 the common people, who did nearly all the work. In Ireland 
 the same thing inevitably took place, since the handful of mailed 
 conquerors were dependent on the natives for all manner of 
 service, while the natives had nothing to gain from learning the 
 speech of their masters. Every Norman baron's child would 
 learn Irish from his nurses and his grooms, as his cousins learned 
 English in England. But where in England the result was a 
 fairly homogeneous population, divided only by status, in Ireland 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 3/ 
 
 it meant, by reason of the chronic influx of new Enghsh, the 
 maintenance of the sharp Hne set up by difference of speech, 
 involving difference of tradition, law, literature, sympathy, ideals. 
 The native population, clearly, had plenty of reproductive 
 animal vigour. Before the Norman Conquest (1014), it had 
 overthrown the Danes. In the following centuries the natural 
 assimilation of the English minority would gradually have made 
 Ireland wholly " Irish." The English Pale, the line within 
 which English law was administered, and Irishmen were treated 
 as worse than outlaws, always tended to recede towards Dublin, 
 and would inevitably have disappeared but for the chronic 
 reintervention of the English kings, using their power to " keep 
 open the wound." And, to worsen matters, there was the added 
 evil that the English garrison, new and old, was largely made up 
 of an anti-social type. Immeasurably more real than distinctions 
 of race are the differences set up in communities by certain 
 processes of social selection. In such enterprises as the con- 
 quest of Peru by Pizarro, and the invasion of Ireland by Strong- 
 bow, there come to the front certain semi-criminal types, the 
 types of the restless adventurer and the outlaw, men blood- 
 stained and ostracised, men eager for wealth without toil, bent 
 on ruling others but little given to ruling themselves. And in 
 every fresh infusion of English blood in Ireland, down till the 
 seventeenth century, there was a large share of that type of 
 character. It is easy, of course, to exaggerate its effect in a 
 community. Leaders of nominally unspotted character have 
 frequently been guilty, in Ireland as elsewhere, of atrocities 
 which no Pizarro could outdo ; and experience seems to show 
 that the posterity of the unstable and criminal types, when duly 
 mixed with other stocks, tends to become normal. It is clear, 
 however, that at the time of first contact the interlopers would 
 always be prone to violence and all manner of unconscientious- 
 ness, and would thus help to keep up in Ireland that atmosphere 
 of distrust and animosity, uncertainty and passion, which be- 
 longed to the old state of tribal strife to start with, and which 
 the institution of the Pale had malignly conserved.^ On scanning 
 
 ■ As against hostile English accounts of Irish character, it is interesting to 
 note an old Irish proverbial opinion of the English with whom they came in 
 contact : 
 
 " With one of English race no friendship make : 
 Shouldst thou, destruction will thee overtake ; 
 He'll lie in wait to ruin thee when he can : 
 Such is the friendship of an English man." 
 Ilanlinian, History of Calway, 1820, p. 68, translating from the Erse. 
 
o 
 
 8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Irish history down to the Parliamentary period, we shall find 
 that scarcely a generation passed without England's doing some- 
 thing to recreate the evil. 
 
 / The advantage of a strong monarchy in the Middle Ages was 
 that it checked feudal anarchy. But the English monarchy in 
 Ireland never attained this end. Its own fiefs were at chronic 
 strife among themselves, the Norman barons having from the 
 first reproduced the state of things formerly on foot among the 
 natives ; and the king was in the nature of the case rather pleased 
 
 Cthan otherwise. Strife among the barons prevented the growth 
 of a common interest, which would naturally tend to be Irish, 
 and to alienate Ireland from English rule. It was not to the 
 king's interest even to check the tyrannies of his Anglo-Irish 
 vassals over their native retainers : the real danger in his eyes 
 _ was that the barons should assimilate too closely to the natives, 
 and so cease to be English. This state of mind was exhibited 
 by Henry II., at the very moment of the conquest; and it seems 
 never to have passed away. The English crown appears to have 
 been constantly in a state of jealous suspicion even of its own 
 ofificial representatives at Dublin ; for it stands on record that in 
 the thirteenth century Ireland had forty-six lord-lieutenants, in 
 the fourteenth century ninety-five, and in the fifteenth century 
 eighty-five. -"^ Such a statistic tells volumes of the system of 
 government. To develop Irish civilisation, to hold the balances 
 between the races and between the barons, to put law on a sound 
 footing and promote the spirit of peace, was a task for the most 
 patient statesmanship. But whether a lord-deputy of Ireland 
 were competent or not it was all the same ; he could effect nothing 
 of importance before he was recalled ; and the tendency in 
 England would be to recall him the sooner, the more desirous 
 he seemed to be of doing any good. 
 
 The first thought of any intelligent viceroy in Ireland, we 
 might suppose, would be to equalise the laws and make inter- 
 course between the races easy and peaceful. This was doubtless 
 proposed by some ; though it is hard to trace in the history of 
 the English administration before the end of the fifteenth century 
 a gleam of intelligent statesmanship. So far from revealing any 
 " innate " English political faculty, that history reveals an almost 
 inconceivable destitution of such faculty. After the failure of 
 the first attempts to rule Ireland on English lines, with no 
 machinery of legal adaptation and conciliation, it became a first 
 principle with the English government to prevent the extension 
 ' Lappenbcrg, cited by Hassencamp, History of Ireland, Eng. tr., p. 4. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 39 
 
 of English law to the natives, much more to avoid any working 
 compromise between the two systems. It cannot indeed be said 
 that the English government even at the outset really sought to 
 bring its laws to bear on the native Irish. By the latter, we are 
 told, the early laws " were not taken notice of," but " the English 
 Government made no attempt to enforce them." ^ It is thus 
 peculiarly absurd to blame the Irish race in mass for remaining 
 so long under their own primitive laws. Many of them seem to 
 have been at one time very willing to come under the English 
 laws, and permission was refused,- save by way of special charters 
 to individuals, which, though numerous, emphasised the general 
 exclusion. One of the landmarks in the record is the " Statute 
 of Kilkenny," passed in 1367, in the reign of Edward III. By 
 this amazing edict it was enacted that any Englishman in Ireland 
 who should (i) connect himself with the Irish either by marriage 
 or sponsorship, or (2) sell a horse or armour to an Irishman, or 
 (3) present a Church living to an Irishman, or (4) receive an 
 Irishman into a monastery, or (5) give hospitality to an Irish 
 
 ^ Historical Rcvie-iv of the Legislative Systems Operative in Ireland, by the 
 Rt. Hon. J. T. Ball, ed. 1889, p. 6. 
 
 - Despite the abundant rewriting of Irish history in modern times, this point 
 remains obscure. Beaumont {Vlrlande, 7"^ edit., i. 40) puts it that the natives 
 had " no disposition to accept the new law of the victor," but his sole authority 
 is the statement of Leland {History of Ireland, I'JTl, i. 225) that they "neither 
 claimed nor enjoyed the benefits of the English constitution." Hassencamp (p, 
 5) expressly asserts that "the benefit of English laws was denied to the Irish, 
 although they specially requested that it might be extended to them ; " but he 
 only gives a general reference to Davies. The truth seemingly lies about mid- 
 way between these statements. Leland somewhat confusedly states (i. 225- 
 226, text and note) that "a few of the most peaceable" of the Irish in the 
 reign of Henry III. sued for " a royal patent by which they might enjoy the 
 rights of P^nglish subjects," and were "admitted by the king to a participation 
 of these rights, notivitlistanding they were denied to their countrymen in 
 general 'f^ going on to say : " There are innumerable records of these g)-ants 
 made to individuals of Irish race. " And he cites some of the documents. From 
 all this it is clear that a general amalgamation might have been effected if the 
 English authorities had had the requisite patience and capacity, and if they 
 had been prepared to begin by using the native language, as their descendants 
 do to-day in India, trusting to natural interest to secure the later acceptance 
 of the tongue of the more civilised nation. It does not appear that the native 
 Irish chiefs were ever, save in very rare instances, invited to attend the Irish 
 Parliaments ; and if they showed disinclination for such attendance, the 
 Norman barons did exactly the same thing. In the case of the latter, fines 
 for non-attendance were imposed from an early period. (Ball, Legislative 
 Systems, as cited, pp. 10, 263.) 
 
140 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 bard, should be held guilty of high treason and be put to death 
 accordingly ; while (6) an Englishman who should take an Irish 
 name, or (7) wear the moustache (then an Irish peculiarity), or (8) 
 wear the Irish costume, was to be punishable by imprisonment and 
 confiscation of property. Such legislation obviously excluded all 
 notion of assimilation between the peoples ; and it was not a new 
 departure, for already it had been enacted (i) that no Irishman 
 should hold any ecclesiastical preferment, or (2) be admissible as a 
 witness in a court of law.^ It has been claimed for these statutes 
 that they aimed rather at maintaining English law among an English 
 population which tended to lapse rapidly into barbarism - than at 
 injuring the natives, who remained under their own laws ; and no 
 doubt the object was rather to sustain English civilisation than to 
 depress Irish. But it is obvious that a system which admitted 
 of no legal arrangement between the two portions of the Irish 
 population could only serve to drive the minority still more in 
 the direction of the majority ; and this was what actually hap- 
 pened, the Statute turning out to be a total failure from the 
 point of view of its framers. The English area steadily shrank, 
 as measured by the range of English speech and institutions. 
 There was all the difference in the world between this half-inert 
 clinging of a feudal power, itself but half-civilised, to a territory 
 which it could not administer, and the all-assimilating sway of 
 Rome, which sent the fibres of its puissant organisation to the 
 furthest corners of its empire, imposing its speech and its laws, its 
 arts and its method, on all races alike. The contact of the half- 
 impotent intruder and the unsubdued native seems to have been 
 O purely mischievous to both alike,^ the intruder always tending to 
 lapse to the culture level of the old population, while the latter, 
 instead of gaining from the culture-contact, learned only to 
 associate outside civilisation with antagonism. It was a mere 
 ■ -xleadlock. 
 
 The worst of the case was that the normal decadence of the 
 English element was never allowed to reach the stage of dis- 
 solution, as it would have done had the elements in Ireland been 
 \ left to themselves. From the moment of disillusion after the 
 ( Conquest, the English population tended to drift back ; but the 
 
 ^ Hassencamp, citing Theiner's I'elcra Monninoita Hibcrnoru»i ct Scotortim 
 historiani ilhtstrauHa (Rome, 1864), p. 16. 
 
 - See the suljject very judicially discussed by Professor Richey, Short 
 History, pp. 207-214. 
 
 •' "The English Government during this period was a source of unmixed 
 evil to the country" (Richey, p. 218). 
 
 T 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. I4I 
 
 English Government would not, could not let the problem so 
 solve itself. When disgusted holders of land grants, large and 
 small, anticipating thus early the fatal absenteeism' of later times, 
 came back to England, leaving their lands to be managed or 
 captured as might be,^ they were met with menaces of fine and 
 confiscation. The king could not consent to let English fief 
 lands be quietly retaken by the natives, and already in 1353 we 
 find laws passed to punish and prevent withdrawals.^ Even 
 these would have failed to fasten an unwilling English popula- 
 tion to the soil, were it not that the king had always the resource 
 of instating new adventurers,^ there being at all times plenty of 
 men of broken fortunes ready to clutch at any means of restoring 
 them. Thus the incessant decay of the English garrison was' 
 chronically repaired, bad material tending to be replaced by 
 worse, all for the sake of maintaining, in accordance with feudal 
 ideals, the phantom dignity of the overlord, while the mass of 
 the Irish people, neither forced under nor attracted to the rule 
 of feudal civilisation, but rather held at the spear's length and 
 taught to see in the intruder the worst of enemies, remained absc 
 lutely unprogressive. 
 
 This is substantially the history of the Anglo-Irish connection 
 for over three hundred years. During the greater part of that time, 
 indeed, civilisation had made but small advance in England. On 
 the side of literature, it had gone back from the rich accomplish- 
 ment of Chaucer to a state of almost abortion under the long 
 storms of chronic civil war ; and only in respect of a slow exten- 
 sion of commerce and the arts of life had there been any growth. 
 Thus when, under Henry VII., there was set at work in Ireland 
 the forcible rule which had begun to work stability and to shelter 
 progress in England, it might have been held that the possibilities 
 of the dependency were not so very far behind those of the main 
 State. Sir Edward Poynings' Act of 1495, framed by that Lord 
 Deputy with a retrospective eye to the various attempts of Anglo- 
 Irish to renew the Wars of the Roses, in which they had shared, 
 had the effect of making the Irish Parliament entirely subordinate 
 to that of England, decreeing as it did that an Irish Parliament 
 should not even be convoked until all the proposed bills had 
 been seen and sanctioned by the English Privy Council, and that 
 
 1 Richey, pp. 1S2-184. 
 
 -Id., p. 206. Hassencamp (p. 4) asserts that "no eftbrl was made to 
 retain the landlords on their estates." On the ne.\t page he shows that an 
 effort was made. 
 
 3 Richey, p. 1S6. 
 
142 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 the bills so authorised must be either passed or rejected without 
 alteration. At the same time, all the recent English statutes 
 were decreed to be applicable in Ireland.^ Here of course there 
 was small prospect of self-development for Ireland ; but in the 
 circumstances of the time the gain from the restriction of the 
 oppressive powers of the Anglo-Irish nobility, who were now 
 forced like the English to limit their feudal following, was prob- 
 ably greater than any harm arising from the checking of their 
 schemes of legislation. The mass of the people were apparently 
 no worse off, if not actually better. And in the next reign, the 
 regal conscientiousness which is at times as notable in the rule of 
 Henry VIII. as his lawless egoism, gave rise to some vigorous 
 efforts towards good government in Ireland. The state of the 
 country was in many respects very like that of Germany at the 
 same period, private war being chronic ; - and a strong govern- 
 ment was the likeliest civilising force conceivable in the circum- 
 stances. Henry was nearly as remarkable, in his day, for his 
 lenity towards the common people as for his ferocities towards 
 his dignitaries and his wives ; and as he was in England, so he 
 was in Ireland. "As regards his Irish policy," Dr Richey 
 decides, "his State papers disclose a moderation, a conciliating 
 spirit, a respect for the feelings of the Celtic population, a 
 
 1 This had already been done by an Act of Edward IV. ; and the principle 
 had long been held to apply in a general way. See Hallam, Const. Hist., 
 loth ed., iii. 362, note. 
 
 ~ The Duke of Argyll, after citing from Professor Richey, with other details, 
 the crowning item that in 1524 " the cities of Cork and Limerick carried on a 
 war against each other by sea and land, sent ambassadors, and concluded a 
 treaty of peace," goes on : " In short, civilised society did not exist in Ireland" 
 [Irish Nationalism, p. 147). The idea thus conveyed will probably be con- 
 siderably modified when it is remembered that a similar state of things existed 
 in the Germany of Luther, where, despite repeated imperial enactments 
 against private war, the practice was still common in the first half of the 
 sixteenth century, having been normal in the fifteenth. Thus Goetz von 
 Berlichingen, who flourished 1480-1562, declared war in 1513 against the city 
 of Niirnberg, and took many merchants prisoners ; and in the previous year 
 the Diet complained of innumerable similar acts among individuals, private 
 citizens attacking, kidnapping, imprisoning, blinding, selling, and assassinat- 
 ing their enemies. In 1519, again, Ulrich of Wiirtemberg made war on the 
 free town of Reutlingen, captured it, and held it till dispossessed by the 
 Swabian League. (Cp. Putter, Historical Development of the Germanic Empire, 
 Eng. tr. , 1790, I, 91, 378-379; Menzel, Geschichte dcr Dciitschen, 3te Aufl., 
 Cap. 364, Stddtische Unruhen ; Kohlrausch, Hist, of Germany, Cap. xv., xvi., 
 Eng. tr., 1844, pp. 339, 343, 354; Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages, 
 ch. v., one-vol. ed., pp. 368-375.) 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 43 
 
 sympathy with the poor, which no subsequent EngUsh ruler has 
 ever displayed." ^ But whatever were the normal possibilities of 
 a well-meaning despotism in Ireland — and the clear failure in 
 England to solve the pressing economic problems of the time 
 leaves the case very doubtful — Henry had already sown the seed 
 of a new growth of evil which was destined to turn all good hopes 
 for Ireland to despair. — 
 
 Of all the elements of strife with which civilisation has been ( 
 cursed, the most inveterate and the most malignant is that of > 
 religious hate ; and this new curse it was that Henry unchained 
 for Ireland when he effected what is called the Reformation in 
 England. That act, so far as his reign was concerned, was 
 simply the expression of his determination to be ecclesiastically 
 as well as politically the master in his own realm. In creed and 
 ritual he was an orthodox Roman Catholic to the last, having no 
 more sympathy with the new Protestant doctrines than he had 
 felt when he called on Ludwig of Bavaria to burn together Luther 
 and his works.- And inasmuch as his determining motive was 
 simply his need to control the marriage law to his domestic 
 exigencies, he had at first no concern to attempt any such 
 measures of ecclesiastical change in Ireland as he carried out in 
 England. At home, the readiness of his personal adherents to 
 enrich themselves with Church property gave him the motive 
 power he needed : in Ireland, there was little of the kind to 
 do ; and what was done followed on the suppression of the 
 CJeraldine rebellion. And whereas there gradually grew up 
 in England in his despite, and afterwards in despite of his 
 daughters, a Protestantism of creed and ritual, there was in 
 the Ireland of that age no possibility of a similar growth. It 
 was not at all a question of race, as we are so often told : 
 it was a question simply of economic conditions and of culture- 
 stage. 
 
 When we turn from the racial and other formulas commonly 
 offered to explain the course of the Reformation, and seek 
 instead an explanation in term& of real social forces, we find that 
 the problem broadly resolves itself into one of a varying balance 
 of interests. In Italy and Spain, as elsewhere, there were out- 
 breaks of the critical spirit which underlay the Reformation ; but 
 in these countries, roughly speaking, the ecclesiastical interest 
 was far too powerful in point of wealth and numbers to be over- 
 
 ' Short Ilisto/y, p. 26S. 
 
 - Letter of 20th May, 1521, cited from Gerdes by Tytler, Life of Henry 
 VIII., p. 134. 
 
144 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 thrown. In PVance, where it was less strong, though still mighty,^ 
 it made head against the enemy in a series of desperate civil 
 wars. In Germany, as in Scandinavia, it was markedly weaker, 
 and there the interests of predatory nobles and frugal laymen 
 sufficed to realise the ideal of anti-Papalism which had been 
 forced on the real Reformers by the Papal policy of resistance 
 to all criticism. In England, where the ecclesiastical interest was 
 probably stronger than in Germany, it perhaps needed the per- 
 sonal equation of the king — employing the avarice of burgesses 
 and nobles, and drawing on the irritation of the common people 
 against the Pope's delays over the divorce as well as against the 
 greed and licence of the priesthood — to break through the 
 Roman bond ; for in England the mere spirit of moral criticism 
 had visibly failed to overpower the general bias to Catholicism. 
 In Scotland, again, the land-hunger of the nobles (who to begin 
 with were no more Lutheran than Henry) sufficed to overthrow 
 a wealthy Church which had lost the respect of the common 
 people, and which the crown, its enricher and normal ally, was too 
 weak to sustain. But in Ireland the conditions were wholly 
 different. The Church had little wealth wherewith to tempt the 
 baronage or alienate the peasantry ; there was almost no town 
 population among whom any form of critical doctrine could take 
 root ; and there was no occasion to complain of the Pope any 
 more than of sacerdotal exactions. Chieftains were indeed found 
 ready enough to grab the monastery lands that were offered 
 them ; and it is on record ^ that the king's renunciation of the 
 supremacy of the Pope was acquiesced in with something like 
 absolute indifference by nobility and clergy alike. But such 
 indifference only proved that in Ireland there was no ecclesi- 
 astical question whatever, and that the churchmen themselves 
 had no idea of w^hat the new proceedings involved, having had 
 no experience of hostility from their parishioners. There was in 
 short, comparatively speaking, nothing to " reform " in ecclesias- 
 tical polity ; and where partially educated England had not yet 
 attained to any heresy of thought, uneducated Ireland could still 
 less have done so. 
 
 ^ It seems to be forgotten by the theorists of race that King Francis himself 
 was long inclined to effect some measure of Reformation, but that, as Herbert 
 puts it, " he feared it might cause a division in his realm, as he saw it had 
 done in the empire" {History of England under Henry VIII., Murray's 
 reprint, p. 528). 
 
 ^ So Green, Short History of the English People, p. 438 ; but the point is 
 not clear, on the face of his own narrative. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. I45 
 
 And when, in the following generations, the new Hebraizing 
 Bible-readers of England began to frame for themselves, with the 
 help of Luther and Calvin, a new system of dogma wherewith to 
 organise intellectually their schism, it lay as plainly in the nature 
 of the case that Ireland should remain outside of the Protestant, 
 movement. The Puritanism of Elizabethan and Caroline Eng- 
 land was above all things a matter of the ferment of the critical 
 spirit in sedentary town populations, living industrially and at 
 peace ; just as Dissent has been in later times, and Secularism 
 in later times still. The Bible being the sole culture-force for 
 those of the commonalty who turned away from the theatre, it 
 became their one social and moral standard, supplying them with 
 a set of sanctions on which they could stand against the Popery 
 which had been politically repudiated by their Government. 
 But in Ireland there was no sedentary and introspective industrial 
 population, no ecclesiastical grievance, and therefore no critical 
 ferment.^ The country was still almost wholly pastoral. To be 
 thus behind England, however, in order of social development, 
 and so in order of preparation for intellectual change, meant for 
 Ireland the being definitely bound up with the Cathohc cause as 
 against the Protestant, Where in normal course there would 
 have been gradual change, there was a sudden and violent check 
 to adaptation. A series of fatalities drove the Irish population 
 more and more into the arms of the Papacy and the Catholic 
 States. Gerald, Earl of Kildare, the Lord Deputy at the date 
 (1531) of Henry's assumption of the headship of the Church, 
 does not seem to have had the slightest thought of taking pro- 
 Papal action ; and his former imprisonment and narrow escape 
 from death for offending Wolsey were not likely to have left him 
 so disposed. But when, called to England to answer unspecified 
 charges, arising out of family feuds,^ he was cast into the Tower 
 (1534), the rumour of his execution set his son, whom he had 
 appointed to hold his place, upon a wild course of insurrection, 
 involving an appeal to Charles V. and the Pope for aid. Eleven 
 years before, Kildare's rebellious kinsman Desmond had con- 
 
 ^ From the later proceedings in the matters of translating the Prayer Book 
 and Catechism, it would appear that even within the English Pale the common 
 people mostly spoke Irish. As there were no Irish books, they can have read 
 nothing. Cp. The Early History of Trinity College, Dublin, by Rev. W. 
 Urwick, 1892, pp. 30, 33, 48. In any case, only the counties of Dublin, 
 Meath, and Louth were English in 1530. See Ilallam, Co)ist. Hist., lOth ed., 
 iii. 360, note. 
 
 - Cp. Herbert's History of England under Henry 17/1., as cited, p. 537, 
 and Ilallam, Const. Hist., iii. 363. 
 
 K 
 
146 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 certed an alliance with King Francis, and more recently he had 
 been in treaty with the emperor ; but what had formerly been 
 recognised as futile plots now began to wear the air of possible 
 international complications, Fitzgerald having offered the Pope, 
 should the crown of Ireland be given him, to make a crusade 
 against Henry. On Fitzgerald's execution, with his five uncles, 
 trapped at a banquet by his successor, Lord Gray, the Irish 
 Parliament was duly made to go through the forms of renounc- 
 ing the Pope, suppressing monasteries, and making over tithes 
 to the king. All this affected only the Pale, yet even there 
 there was soon felt tacit resistance and priestly plotting, followed 
 by fresh revolt, all duly crushed by Lord Gray, who proved his 
 sufficiently anti-Catholic temper by destroying many monuments 
 to St. Patrick and burning the cathedral of Down. When he 
 after all shared the common fate of Henry's servants, being 
 beheaded on the charge of having connived at the escape of 
 the youngest Fitzgerald, the Irish people were well on the way 
 to determined Catholicism, though the later revolts failed like the 
 earlier. The English king's assumption of the title of king of 
 Ireland, and the bestowal of church lands on those nobles who 
 acquiesced, left the country only more definitely Catholic, the 
 forms of worship being left all the while unchanged. 
 
 It is needless to follow in detail the strifes of the following 
 reigns. The Protestantising measures of the English Govern- 
 ment under Edward VI. were naturally resisted. Henry VIII. 
 had sought to enforce the English language on the people 
 through the clergy, and the Council of his son sought to 
 enforce an English Prayer-Book. To this day the Presbyterians 
 of Scotland take pride in the refusal of their ancestors, with less 
 cause, to accept an English Service-Book ; and what is held patri- 
 otic in Scotland cannot be reckoned otherwise in Ireland. The 
 revolts were suppressed, and the leaders executed in breach of 
 faith ; but the people clave to their old priests, exactly as did the 
 Presbyterians of Scotland in the next century. Only gradually, 
 indeed, did the sense of utter religious severance grow up in 
 Ireland, since it was only by degrees that Protestant fanaticism 
 developed itself in England, after Henry's death. That was 
 the fountain of the evil. Lord St. Leger, as Lord Deputy, seems 
 to have worked zealously enough for the promotion of the Pro- 
 testant interest ; but inasmuch as he tempered his zeal with a 
 little local discretion, he was recalled, and a more uncompro- 
 mising zealot put in his place. Then came the rising of Shane 
 O'Neill, civil war being only averted by the accession of Mary. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 47 
 
 But so far was Ireland still from being fanatically Catholic, that 
 despite the ascendancy given by Mary to the Catholic interest, 
 under a Catholic Lord-Lieutenant, there were no reprisals against 
 individuals ; only those ecclesiastical endowments being restored 
 which had remained in the hands of the Crown, while not only 
 were there no martyrdoms, but the Protestants had perfect free- 
 dom to worship in their own way in Dublin itself,^ a height of 
 tolerance of which the Protestants of the next generation showed 
 themselves everywhere incapable. Catholic Ireland, in fact, 
 was absolutely a refuge for terrorised English Protestants. 
 On the other hand, the normal English incapacity to treat 
 fairly a dependent people came out in atrocious tyrannies even 
 under a Catholic rule. The chiefs O'Moore and O'Connor 
 having rebelled on a political grievance, their estates were con- 
 fiscated and bestowed on English colonists ; and when the 
 native tenants refused to give way, insisting that under Irish 
 law the land belonged not to the chief but to the entire clan, 
 they were massacred wholesale, and the English settlers duly 
 installed. Thus were constituted the new shires. King's County 
 and Queen's County, in name of Philip and Mary. 
 
 With Elizabeth, driven into political Protestantism by the 
 tactics of the Catholic States, there came the religious reversal, 
 with still worse measures of social policy. The Earl of Sussex, 
 who as a Catholic Lord-Lieutenant had massacred the tribesmen 
 under Mary, returned to enforce Protestantism under Elizabeth, 
 and year by year the people become more devoted to their pro- 
 scribed faith. The Bishops, mostly ready to change creeds with 
 a change of crowns, represented for them only English tyranny 
 and avarice ; the curates, mostly Irish-speaking,- clung the more 
 warmly to the old religion ; and the Government of Elizabeth 
 was utterly unable to carry out its aspirations in the way of pro- 
 viding a Protestant clergy. Protestant rule accordingly meant 
 for the mass of the people only futile oppression, rousing semi- 
 savage chiefs to blind insurrections, repressed by horrible mas- 
 sacres. There is nothing in modern history to compare with 
 the story of the suppression of the Munster rebellion by "the 
 good Lord Graye,"^ (the second Lord Deputy of that name) 
 
 ' Hassencamp, p. 18. 
 
 ^ Even in the diocese of Meath, "one of the best regulated ihstricts in the 
 country," there were in the year 1576 only 18 English-speaking curates ; and 
 of 244 parish churches, only 144 had a resident clergyman. See Hassencamp, 
 pp. 21-22. 
 
 ^ Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Spenser's 
 Works, p. 654. 
 
1^48 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 unless it be the stories of later abominations committed in 
 the same land by later English leaders. It outwent most con- 
 temporary horrors. As Mr Froude has put it, in a moment 
 of relapse from patriotic sentiment, 
 
 "The English nation was shuddering over the atrocities of the Duke 
 of Alva. The children in the nurseries were being inflamed to patriotic 
 rage and madness by tales of Spanish tyranny. Yet Alva's bloody 
 sword never touched the young, the defenceless, or those whose sex 
 even dogs can recognise and respect." ^ 
 
 It was left to the Protestant commanders of Elizabeth, of James, 
 and of Charles, to slay " not the armed kernes only, but the 
 aged and infirm, the nursing mother, and the baby at the breast." 
 Sir Nicholas Malby, President of Connaught, being commissioned 
 to ravage the Burkes' country, avowed in writing that he spared 
 "neither old nor young ;"^ others have told how in Desmond's 
 country, after all resistance had ceased, the soldiers would drive 
 men and women into barns and burn them there ; how they 
 would toss and twirl infants on the points of their spears ; how 
 the bands of Pelham and Ormond " killed blind and feeble men, 
 women, boys and girls, sick persons, idiots, and old people." 
 And after the massacres came the direr deaths of the computed 
 30,000 men, women, and children, who died of famine, and who 
 were found in the ditches " with their mouths all coloured green 
 by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above 
 ground," yea, and who in their extremity " did eate the dead 
 carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one 
 another soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared 
 not to scrape from their graves." Englishmen looked-on, it 
 seems, giving no succour ; the policy of destroying all food having 
 been deliberately adopted.^ It is worth the while of present-day 
 English Christians, when thrilling with anger at the atrocities of 
 ^ Turks, to remember that their Protestant ancestors of but three 
 centuries ago wrought bloodier deeds than those of the Moslem 
 Sultan and his Khurds, on the same sort of inspiration. For 
 nothing but a concurrence of the two malignities of race and of 
 creed, surely, could have led men so wont to denounce the 
 cruelties of others thus to surpass their worst foes in systematic 
 
 * History of England, ed. 1875, x. 508. 
 
 "^ Id., xi. 197. Cp. X. 500, 507, 512. 
 
 ■'Spenser, View, as cited, p. 654; Lecky, History of Ireland in the 
 Eighteenth Century, new ed., i. 8. See p. 9 for mention of worse horrors 
 still ; also the collection of testimonies made by Mr Fox, Key to the Irish 
 Question, ch. xxix. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. '149 
 
 ferocity. Gray was Spenser's patron, the Arthegal of ' the 
 Faerie Queene^ the representative of ideal justice in the poem ; 
 and the poet declares that all who knew him " knewe him to 
 be most gentell, affable, loving, and temperate ; but that the 
 necessitye of that present state of thinges enforced him to that 
 violence, and almost chaunged his very naturall disposition." - 
 He was either a weak man turned into a savage, as weak 
 men may be, or a zealot beside himself. And even in England 
 there was so much of recoil from his deeds that he was recalled ; 
 so that, as Spenser (his former secretary) complains, Gray's settle- 
 ment was 
 
 " all suddaynly turned topsy-turvy ; the noble Lord eft-sones was 
 blamed : the wretched people pittyed, and new counsells plotted, in 
 which it was concluded that a general pardon should be sent over to 
 all that would accept of it, uppon which all former purposes were 
 blaunked, the Governour at a baye, and not only all that greate and 
 long charge which [the Queen] had before bene at, quite lost and 
 cancelled, but also that hope of good which was even at the doore putt 
 backe, and clean frustrated." -^ 
 
 Such were at that juncture the feelings of the English idealist 
 poet, who with others received an estate out of the 574,628 
 acres confiscated in Munster, well manured with slaughtered 
 men, women, and children. Yet he was saner and more humane 
 than the English rulers, who, whether before or after the recall 
 of Gray, had parcelled out the land to English bidders on the 
 condition that they should not sublet any of it to natives.* The 
 idea was to exterminate the race. Spenser, though he preached 
 the policy of starvation for the crushing of insurrections, proposed 
 on the other hand that when peace was restored the Irish should 
 be placed as tenants under English landlords ; ^ and he planned 
 the systematic extension of agriculture, as being more favourable 
 than mere pasturage to civilisation.*^ 
 
 ' Hallam, iii. 371, note. ' View, p. 655. ^ Id., ih. 
 
 ■* Leland, History of Ireland, 3rd ed., ii. 301. Lecky and Hassencamp fcillow 
 Leland in describing the arrangement as absolute, without considering whether 
 (Jray's recall did not cancel it, as the above-cited words of Spenser, and his 
 complaint against Perrot, would seem to imply. 
 
 5 View, p. 663. 
 
 ^ Id., p. 678. Mr Lecky does Spenser a serious injustice by staling (History 
 of Ireland, as cited, i. 19) that "after the lapse of ten years from the com- 
 mencement of the Settlement, Spenser complained that the new proprietorB, 
 'instead of keeping out the Irish, doe not only make the Irish their tenants in 
 
150 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 To some extent the spirit of humane statesmanship was 
 actually brought to bear after Gray's recall. Sir John Perrot, 
 his successor, gave out the general pardon ; and he effected 
 in Connaught a land settlement which, by providing for the 
 natives, kept that province tranquil for a generation.^ Among 
 the better-placed survivors from the massacres, too, there was a 
 certain readiness to accept the English speech and English 
 ways ; - and the towns, though they were almost wholly Catholic, 
 had remained all along politically loyal to the Crown. As early 
 as 1573, Speaker Stanihurst, a Catholic, speaking at the pro- 
 rogation of the Irish Parliament, on the proposal to establish 
 grammar schools and a university, gave the testimony : — 
 
 " In mine experience who have not yet seen much more than forty 
 years, I am able to say that our Realme is at this day an halfe deale 
 more civil than it was, since noblemen and worshipfull, with others of 
 ability, have used to send their sonnes into England, to the Law, to 
 Universities, or to Schooles. Now when the same Schooles shall be 
 brought home to their doors this addition discreetly made will foster 
 a young frye likely to prove themselves good members of the Common- 
 wealth. . . ."•' 
 
 Some such gains may have to some extent gone on in the towns, 
 or at least in the capital, from this time forward, gradually leading 
 up to the degree of intellectual development which we find in the 
 Dublin of Molyneux and Swift. But for the peasantry, making 
 nine-tenths of the whole population, there was to be no possibility 
 of peaceful and prosperous evolution for centuries yet to come. 
 The conciliatory Perrot was in his turn recalled, and executed on 
 a charge of treason ; and his successor, Fitzwilliam, wrought 
 
 those lands and thrust out the English, but also some of them become mere 
 Irish.'" The passage here quoted {View, as cited, p. 675) is in express 
 reference to " (he great tnen which had such grauntcs [of land] made them at 
 first by the Kiiiges of England" and does not at all refer to the recent settlers. 
 Spenser was really pointing to the past conduct of the Anglo-Irish lords as a 
 reason for disregarding their present vexatious claims. The last clause cited 
 by Mr Lecky might have served to guard him against such a misconception as 
 he has fallen into. He cannot have read the rest of the View with proper 
 attention. Spenser has had enough of odium for his part in Irish affairs 
 without this added injustice. Certainly his devotion to Gray made him 
 obstinately hostile to Perrot (p. 656) ; but his own proposals are specific. 
 
 ' Lecky, i. 17, citing Sigerson, Leland, and Strafford's Letters. See Froude, 
 History of England, ed. 1875, ^'' 265, as to Perrot's ideals. 
 
 ^ See the passage from Robert Payne, cited below, p. 15S, and cp. 
 Gardiner, History of England, 1603- 1642, ed. 1893, '• 38"> 4°6. 
 
 ■' Cited by Urwick, Early History of Trinity College, p. 2. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. I5I 
 
 against the chiefs with a shameless treachery which left their 
 primitive cunning far in the rear. The see-saw of conciliation 
 and coercion was resumed. In the last years of Elizabeth, and 
 of the century, came the rising of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 
 whose English training had left him as hotly bent as any of his 
 ancestors on maintaining his barbaric status and barbaric powers, 
 and whose grievances against the English Government do not 
 seem to have been worse than the grievances of his vassals 
 against him. As usual, the clan suffered for the chief, and the 
 sagacious Eord Mountjoy mowed them down by sword and 
 famine in Ulster as the " good " Lord Gray had done in Munster. 
 The quarrel was emphatically between the chief and the Govern- 
 ment ; and if the Government had but followed up the chief and 
 shown favour to his vassals and clansmen, they might have rapidly 
 loosened the old ties of clan devotion, so tyrannous in general 
 were the chieftains towards their own people. But the Govern- 
 ment must needs seek to destroy the tribe as well as its ruler ; 
 and a common memory of misery kept chief and people still at 
 one. The end was that after the face of the land was covered as 
 of old with ashes and corpses, O'Neill was allowed to make his 
 peace, and live to plot another day. 
 
 Then it was that, under King James, the English Government 
 had its great opportunity to root its rule in justice and wisdom. 
 Once more the people of Ulster were separable from their chief, 
 who had kept his earldom on the footing of an English landlord, 
 but treated his vassals as lawlessly as of old.^ Mountjoy, in 
 overrunning Ulster, had anticipated the step that was to be taken 
 two centuries later in the Scotch Highlands : wherever he went 
 he made his hold sure by well-placed forts. The military 
 problem was thus simple ; and Sir Arthur Chichester, the 
 Deputy under whom was effected the settlement of Ulster, had 
 the will and many of the faculties for a good solution. Yet his 
 Protestant bigotry set him astray at the outset. To him the 
 Catholic religion was " wicked," '' and, not content with gratifying 
 the wish of the English ruling class to banish Catholic priests 
 and discountenance Catholicism, he set about dragooning the 
 recusants, high and low, till he brought upon himself from the 
 English Privy Council itself a request to justify his action in issuing 
 "precepts under the Great Seal to compel men to come to 
 church."^ Fear of such oppression had caused insurrection 
 among the southern towns in the last days of Elizabeth ; and 
 
 ' See Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, ed. 1893, i. 3S1. 
 '-Id., p. 394. •'/</., p. 396. 
 
152 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 only the memory of the late war, and the arrest of Chichester's 
 persecution, prevented a general insurrection in the north. 
 He saw as much,^ and reluctantly set himself to other 
 courses, counting on educating the young. But nothing could 
 henceforth avert the fatal and ever-intensifying war of the 
 two creeds. An excellent historian tells us that the English 
 ruling class " had a strong feeling of the benefits which would 
 result if the Irish could be induced to accept the religion under 
 Avhich England had grown in moral stature," and that Chichester 
 persecuted " not from any persecuting spirit, but because he had 
 believed that the religion of the Catholics made them enemies to 
 order and government." - Yet the same historian shows re- 
 peatedly that one of the worst obstacles to good rule and 
 Protestant progress in Ireland was the utter unconscientiousness 
 of the Protestant clergy ; ^ and that another was the inveterate 
 chicanery of the Protestant lawyers ; '^ and a historian of another 
 stamp, a eulogist of the Reformation, gravely suggests that one 
 of the causes that broke down the mind of Elizabeth was the 
 sense of the decay of character in Protestant England in her 
 day.^ We had better just describe fanaticism by its name, and 
 recognise it henceforth as the force for evil it has been. 
 
 It varied, of course, from time to time. When, after the 
 collapse of minor risings, the English had it all their own way 
 in Ulster, Chichester aimed at something like fairness in the 
 redistribution of the land. But by this time the councillors 
 at London^ who had recoiled from bullying Catholics into 
 Protestant Churches, had no scruple about taking away from 
 the bulk of the people of Ulster their old sept-rights in the 
 land, and giving the greater part of it out of hand to English 
 and Scottish colonists, who seem mostly to have been of the 
 evil old " adventurer " class, and were thus much less worth 
 cultivating as inhabitants than the natives.'' The Government 
 
 ' Cp. Vol. ii., p. 284, noie. 
 
 - Gardiner, vol. i., pp. 389, 399. 
 
 •'7(2'., pp. 401, 419. Cp. Froude, History of Engla)td, ed. 1875, x. 534. 
 
 ^ E.g., pp. 422, 439. 
 
 '' Froude, History of England, i. 61. Vet in another passage (xi. 201) Mr 
 Froude goes far beyond Mr Gardiner in enlarging on the moral blessings that 
 " England " wanted to bestow on " her wayward sister." 
 
 " They included Bacon. See Gardiner, i. 435, as to his attitude. 
 
 '' Cp. Gardiner, i. 440, as to the rapid improvement of the natives, and 
 Lecky, i. 22, for contemporary testimony as to the colonists from England and 
 Scotland being generally " the scum of both nations." 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 53 
 
 had now "lost all sense of feeling for the natives,"^ and hoped ~ 
 to thin them down either by "venting them out of the land" 
 or by driving them into its wildernesses. In large part the 
 intended cruelty was not accomplished. The colonists wanted 
 labourers, and they hired natives perforce. " The mass of the 
 inhabitants remained in their own homes. They made them- 
 selves too useful to be removed." - But they remained on the 
 footing of a disliked and inferior race, held down by the ill- 
 conditioned aliens who had robbed them of the land, clinging 
 all the while determinedly to their old faith, which the in- 
 truders insulted and would fain have destroyed. Thus there 
 grew up a double heritage of hate, determining the destinies of 
 the generations to come. 
 
 As time went on the character of the intruding Protestant 
 element revealed itself mainly in the working of further iniquity 
 under the name of law. What small provision of land had been-? 
 made for the natives was in all directions frustrated by the 
 machinery of English law, which, vaunted as an instrument of 
 progress and security as against the native system, in reality \ 
 lent itself to systematic wickedness in a way that no barbaric ) 
 code ever did or could. Titles were everywhere broken down 
 by the professional creation and exposure of technical flaws, so 
 that it was actually a profitable trade to cause confiscations. At 
 length, seeing the profits made by private persons in the business, 
 James and his advisers deliberately planned to undo the whole 
 of the titles set up by Perrot in Connaught in the previous 
 generation, on the score that, though ;!{^3ooo had been paid 
 for the enrolment of the patents, the officials had omitted to 
 register them ; and at James's death his ministers were about 
 to take ;^ 1 0,000 as a fine from the holders collectively, with 
 a doubled annual composition. Finally, Charles I. in 1628 
 actually received ^120,000 from the Irish landlords all round, 
 as payment for an enactment that all titles undisputed for sixty 
 years should stand good, that the people of Connaught should be 
 registered as lawful proprietors, and that Catholic disabilities 
 should be withdrawn. Yet, after the payment of the money, 
 under pressure of the English Parliament, the Lord Deputy 
 Lord Falkland in 1629 prohibited afresh the Catholic worship; 
 and a few years later the Lord Deputy Wentworth, not yet 
 known as Strafford, actually cancelled the legalisation of the 
 Connaught titles, and the sixty years' prescription. While these 
 infamies were fully endorsed by Charles, the English Parliament 
 ^ Gardiner, i. 43S. - /d., p. 441. 
 
154 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 on its part pressed on to the utmost of its power the expulsion 
 of Catholic priests and the suppression of the Catholic worship, 
 the Puritan party loudly proclaiming its intention to make an 
 end of toleration. 
 
 After all this, we are asked to regard the Irish rebellion and 
 massacre of 1641 as a monstrous crime on the part of the Irish 
 people ; and such a moralist as Carlyle has solemnly adjured the 
 Irishmen of to-day, in view of that event, to say nothing more 
 about " the hoof of the Saxon." The adjuration is to be met 
 with the derision due to all the English heroics on the subject. 
 The English nation had simply reaped as it had sown, devilry 
 for devilry. Modern research has gone to show that the element 
 of massacre, to begin with, has been grossly exaggerated, as it 
 was sure to be by a nation w'hich had let pass the wanton 
 slaughter by sword and famine of myriads of Irish, at the hands 
 of its own rulers, with barely a protest, while heaping habitual 
 execration on the cruelties of Spaniards in another hemisphere. 
 It is quite certain that there was no fore-planned massacre, and 
 that nothing of the kind occurred at the beginning of the re- 
 bellion. As it went on, many savage murders were committed. 
 What else was to be expected ? The marvel is that instead of 
 random ferocities there was not " a murder grim and great " as 
 that of the Niblungs' song. There had been exasperation enough, 
 wrong enough, to have moved a half-civilised people to plot the 
 utter extermination of the aliens who had for generations figured 
 for them more and more as a race of brigands, destitute alike 
 of mercy, justice, and truth, and who were avowedly seeking to 
 compass the destruction of the religion of the mass of the subject 
 race. Even a nominally civilised nation gives abundant play 
 to the passions of the primary human beast when its masses are 
 lashed up to revolt ; and we have seen that the Protestant 
 aristocrats of the court of Elizabeth wrought wholesale horrors 
 which to-day would mark them for infamy in Turkey itself. 
 They had slain women and babes, old men and idiots ; and 
 they had gleefully schemed the extinction of the people of half 
 a province by slow starvation. In all the massacres of 1641-43, 
 it would seem, there may have perished, by murder or by ex- 
 \i posure, from 4000 to 12,000 persons.^ The "good" Elizabethan 
 commanders had caused the death of as many women. What 
 then was to be looked for at the hands of rude men driven mad 
 by perpetual wrong ? For most of the deaths in the later strife, 
 
 ^ See the investigation of Mr Lecky, vol. i., pp. 41-104, and his summing- 
 up at p. 79. Cp. Gardiner, x. 69 ; and Hassencamp's notes, pp. 59-61. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORV. 1 55 
 
 indeed, the blame lies with the English Parliament, which, instead 
 of meeting the rebellion as such, proceeded at once to vote that 
 no toleration should henceforth be permitted in Ireland. Such 
 an insensate enactment was simply a signal for extremities of 
 savagery on both sides ; and they were duly reached. The 
 savageries of the Irish could not possibly exceed those on the 
 other side. "In one day eighty women and children in Scotland 
 were flung over a high bridge into the water, solely because they 
 were the wives and children of Irish soldiers." ^ The Protestant 
 beast could hold his own with the Catholic. Writers who, in 
 full view of all that went before, have still no other verdict to 
 give in the matter than one against Popery and Irishry, are only 
 surviving illustrations of the insane unrighteousness which brought 
 about the whole hideous history. 
 
 For the rest, Cromwell's ending of the war is the end of all 
 pretence that the savagery in it was special to the Irish. For our 
 modern Cromwellian school, his conduct in this as in other 
 relations is exemplary, the manifestation at once of perfect 
 religious sincerity and of a genius for action. It may here 
 suffice to say that many generals might similarly have shortened 
 many wars by resorting to demoniac methods with a sufficient V 
 force at command. Napoleon might have destroyed for many 
 years the resisting power of the countries he overran if he had 
 massacred all who resisted him, and all their priests. But 
 Napoleon, though he is never cited as a moral model, did not, 
 after Egypt, do these things. Tamerlane seems to have achieved 
 great effects by such methods, but he does not usually rank as a 
 great moral force. The simple truth is that Cromwell, a civilised 
 soldier in home warfare, sank several degrees nearer the savage 
 when he passed to Ireland, his racial hate and his religious 
 hate combining to make him furnish very fair justification for 
 a sufficiency of Catholic atrocities on the Continent. He, who 
 put the garrisons and inhabitants of whole towns to the sword 
 because they would not surrender without a blow, and caused 
 friars to be slaughtered like dogs,- could wax indignant over the 
 
 ^ Lecky, i. 83, citing Carte's Life of Oriitoiid, i. 481. Cp. Prendergast's 
 Cromwellian Settlement, pp. 67, 68. 
 
 - This was by Cromwell's express order. His men, so primed, slew women 
 and children, and were vile enough, when following the enemy up to the 
 towers and galleries of churches, to take up children and use them as shields, 
 thus preventing their antagonists from striking in self-defence. Nothing more 
 atrocious is recorded in the history of the time. See the testimony of Anthony 
 a Wood, got from his brother, in iiis autobiography, ed. Oxford, 184S, 
 pp. 51-52. 
 
156 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 slaughtering of foreign " saints " nearer his own way of thinking ; 
 and Milton, who could wildly falsify the facts as to the Irish 
 rebellion, produced fervid prose and poetry on behalf of the 
 AValdenses. It would be easy to misjudge the psychological 
 problem which such men thus present ; but we might at least 
 be spared some declamation over their ethical excellence. 
 
 When Cromwell had done his work, it was estimated that out 
 of a population of 1,466,000, some 616,000 "had in eleven 
 years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially 
 produced ;" 504,000 being reckoned Irish, and 112,000 English.^ 
 Then there were the thousands sold into slavery in the ^Vest 
 Indies by authority of Cromwell or his Government, and the 
 tens of thousands allowed to enlist in foreign service — all going 
 to make such a depopulation that " in some districts the traveller 
 rode twenty or thirty miles without seeing one trace of human 
 life." And now once more the English Government was free 
 to " settle " the greater part of the land with inhabitants of its 
 own stocks ; and a Puritan colonisation was duly effected, the 
 remaining Irish being either driven into Connaught or left to 
 be hewers of wood and drawers of water for the English colonists. 
 It is on record that a period of prosperity followed, as might well 
 be in a country which had lost nearly half its population in ten 
 years. There can at least have been no surplus labour. But 
 there had been sown afresh all the requisite seeds of strife, and 
 misery, and frustration. At the Restoration, some hundreds of 
 Catholic landlords were reinstated in whole or in part, in the 
 teeth of a furious Protestant outcry, which prevailed against any 
 further readjustments ; and whereas two-thirds of the best land 
 had been formerly owned by Catholics, it was now fast in the 
 grip of their enemies. Naturally, a vigorous attempt to right the 
 wrong was made when James II. set about restoring Catholicism. 
 The proceedings of the Catholic Parliament of 1689, as cleared 
 up by the research of Thomas Davis, were certainly on the whole 
 " more moderate and honest, and essentially fairer," - than those 
 of the English Parliaments of that age, and of the Protestant Parlia- 
 ment which followed it. But Protestantism definitely triumphed 
 in England in 1688 for the main reasons for which Catholicism 
 
 ~ ' Lecky, i. 104, citing Petty. 
 
 - Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in editorial intiod. to new ed. of Davis' Patriot 
 Parliament of 1689, p. 7. "I invite the reader to note," says the same 
 editor, " that the identical offences charged on James's Catholic ParHament 
 by partisan writers (and here disproved) were committed without shame or 
 reserve by the Protestant Parliaments of tlie same era in both countries." 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 57 
 
 had triumphed in Italy and Spain : it had come to represent a 
 great preponderance of vested interests : and it was accordingly 
 the fate of Ireland to feel for the next hundred years all that 
 Protestant malice could inflict on the adherents of the Pope, and 
 all of iniquity that the English commercial interest, supported by 
 the religious motive, could plan by way of destroying Irish trade. 
 
 \§ 2. The Modern Problem. 
 
 Thus were laid the bases of the Ireland of modern times ; and 
 it is well that at this point, where mediaeval Ireland is virtually 
 done with, and when not only had the English Government 
 acquired complete hold of all Irish political institutions but the 
 very population had been in large part transformed, to sum up 
 the general facts arrived at, as regards the influence of race 
 qualities on the destinies of the people. _ 
 
 It has thus far sufficiently appeared, then, that nothing in the 
 course of things up to the utter embitterment of the religious t^>i 
 schism is rationally to be set down to any special qualities of 
 " race " in the Irish people. The political developments, be it 
 repeated, were such as would have been set up in the same con- 
 ditions in any race, and actually were set up in groups of 
 English birth. As we have seen, the Irish people like the 
 English were a blend of many stocks ; and as a matter of fact 
 the " English " blood introduced into Ireland from the twelfth 
 century onwards was notoriously one of the main sources of 
 disaffection. Spenser testified ^ of the descendants of earlier 
 English settlers that 
 
 " They are much more stubborne and disobedient to lawe and govern- 
 ment then the Irish be, and viore malicious to the English that day lye 
 are sent over. . . . They say that the lande is theyrs onely by 
 right, being first conquered by theyr auncestours, and that they are 
 wronged by the new English mens intruding therunto, whom they call 
 AUoonagh with as greate reproche as they would rate a dogge." 
 
 As regards the mass of the people, it is clear from Spenser's 
 testimony that they were as good raw material as any. 
 
 "I have heard some greate warriours say," he writes,- "that in all 
 the services which they had seene abroade in forrayne countreys, they 
 
 1 View of the Present State of Irelaitd, Globe ed. of Works, p. 675. 
 - View, as cited, pp. 639, 640. 
 
158 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 never saw a more comely horseman than the Irish man, nor that 
 Cometh on more bravely in his charge. . . . Sure they are very 
 vaHaunte and hardy, for the most part great endurours of cold, labour, 
 hunger, and all hardiness, very active and stronge of hand, very swift 
 of foote, very vigilaunte and circumspect in theyr enterprises, very 
 present in perrills, very great scorners of death. . . . The Irishman 
 . . . when he conieth to experience of service abroade, and is putt to 
 a peece or a pyke, he makyth as woorthy a souldiour as any nation he 
 meeteth with." 
 
 Nor did they show any moral unfitness for a reign of law. 
 Robert Payne, an English settler, author of A Brief Description 
 of Ireland \)\yh'\\'!,)\ed in 1589, gives as good a character as could 
 be wished to the more fortunate survivors of the Munster mas 
 sacres : — 
 
 " The better sorte are very civill and honestly given ; the most of 
 them greatly inclined to husbandrie, although as yet unskillful, not- 
 withstanding through their great travell many of them are rich in 
 cattle. Most of them speak good English and bring up their children 
 to learning. I saw in a grammar-school at Limbrick one hundred 
 and threescore schollers, most of them speaking good and perfect 
 English, for that they have used to construe the Latin into English. 
 They keep their promise faithfully, and are more desirous of peace 
 than our Englishmen, for that in time of warres they are more charged. 
 . . . They are quick-witted, and of good constitution of bodie : they 
 reform themselves daylie more and more after the English manners. 
 Nothing is more pleasing unto them than to hear of good justices 
 placed amongst them. . . . They are obedient to the laws, so that 
 you may travel through all the land without any danger or injurie 
 offered of the very worst Irish, and be greatly releaved of the best. 
 ... I myself divers times have seen in severall places within their 
 jurisdictions well near twenty causes decided at one sitting, with 
 such indifferencie that for the most part both plaintiff and defendant 
 hath departed contented." ^ 
 
 So too Sir John Davies, who on his own part helped to show 
 the Irish how much more immoral civilised law could be than 
 barbaric custom, avowed what has been noted ever since, that 
 private crime in Ireland was remarkably rare. 
 
 " For the truth is that in time of peace the Irish are more fearful to 
 offend the law than the English or any other nation whatsoever. . . . 
 There is no nation or people under the sun that doth love equal or 
 
 ^ Cited by Lecky, i. 20, from the Irish Archa;ological Society's Tracts 
 relating to Ir eland ^ vol. i. 
 
THE LP:SS0N of IRISH HISTORY. 1 59 
 
 indifferent justice better than the Irish, or will rest better satisfied 
 with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves." ' 
 
 On the other hand it has appeared that, while the main 
 insurrections before 1641 were led by Irish chiefs of septs, 
 sometimes of Norman descent, Catholicism was clung to by the 
 whole population, English and Irish alike, there being no sign 
 whatever of any innate Protestant bias in the " Teutonic " 
 element any more than in the Celtic. The English-speaking 
 and English-descended middle class of the towns were as 
 determined in their recusancy as the Erse-speaking peasantry : 
 indeed they resisted the more direct pressure. There is then not 
 a jot of evidence for the theory of a Celtic proclivity to Popery.^ 
 
 The resistance offered in Ireland to English ecclesiastical 
 coercion was much less recklessly violent than that offered in 
 Lowland Scotland ; ^ but the temper which refused dictation 
 in such matters was primordial in the two cases alike. 
 
 As regards real faults of character, again, the history of the 
 next century reveals in the case of the descendants of the Crom- 
 wellian settlers exactly what the history of the previous centuries 
 had done in the case of the descendants of " Norman " settlers. 
 Assuming the Commonwealth settlers to have been average or 
 "good" English types (and many of them must have been, though 
 
 ^ Cited by Lecky, i., 25. Compare the narrative of Gardiner, i. 380, 406, 
 &c. 
 
 ■^ Mr Gardiner, recognising the causation of Irish Catholicism, yet thinks 
 (i. 389) "it may well be doubted whether the impressionable Irish Celt 
 would ever have been brought to content himself with the sober religious 
 forms which have proved too sober for considerable bodies of Englishmen." 
 I venture to suggest that this remark proceeds on a misconception. It is 
 possible to make any service humdrum, and for many Catholics the Catholic 
 service has been and is so. At the same time it is possible to make any 
 service fervid, and the "Celts" of Wales and the Scotch Highlands seem to 
 get out of Methodism and Presbyterianism whatever religious excitation they 
 require, remaining averse to the Anglican service, which attracts the more 
 cultured of the "non-Celtic" populations, so called, much more than it does 
 the unsophisticated "Celts." 
 
 •' Dr Hassencamp so far countenances the conventional notion of Irish 
 character as to pronounce the riot in a Catholic Church in Dublin in 1629 a 
 "truly Irish excess." Yet his own page narrates that it was caused by the 
 Anglican Archbishop attempting to break up a congregation at worship ; and 
 the people involved on both sides were mainly of English descent. Perhaps 
 Dr Hassencamp will balance his doctrine by pronouncing that the riot in an 
 Edinburgh church in 1637 was a "truly ScoKisk excess"; and similar riots 
 in Germany "truly German," — this " in spite of all temptations to belong to 
 other nations." 
 
l6o THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 we have seen that many of their predecessors were black sheep) 
 the descendants mostly degenerated into idle, drinking, brawling 
 squireens of the type which discredited Ireland in the eighteenth 
 century. Puritan stock and Puritan creed, then, availed nothing 
 to maintain or promote civilisation under the conditions created 
 in Ireland by England. What is more, we find that two genera- 
 tions had not elapsed after the Cromwellian settlement before the 
 English rule had set up in the new Anglo-Irish population as 
 bitter an anti-English feeling as had ever subsisted before, many 
 of the Protestants being even more embittered than the 
 Catholics. The new " constitutional " England was if possible 
 more methodically iniquitous to her dependency, when its whole 
 political machinery had been Protestantised, than the old mon- 
 archic England had been. The injustices of the past had for the 
 most part been wreaked on native clans and small landowners, 
 all identified with the Catholic interest : the new policy was to 
 cripple or destroy the trade of Ireland in general, wherever it 
 might seem to compete with that of England. In matters of trade, 
 Trojan and Tyrian were much the same in the eyes of the traders 
 of England. Hume has laid it down ^ as a general principle that 
 free states always treat their dependencies worse than do 
 monarchies, pointing to the rule of the Carthaginians in antiquity, 
 and to that of England over Ireland as compared with that of 
 France over her conquered provinces in modern times. Though 
 the principle soon breaks down on scrutiny — in the case of 
 Turkey, for instance — it is so far true that "free" states, when 
 half moralised, give the freer play to the selfishness of their 
 ruling and trading classes as against dependencies, caring for 
 freedom only within their own borders. And in England for 
 a century after 1688, even during Tory interludes, the trading 
 classes were so far able to shape the policy of the Government, 
 which owed so much to their support, that they could subordinate 
 all the other trading interests of the empire to theirs. There 
 was now no thought whatever of good government in Irish 
 interests, such as had been cherished now and then by former 
 deputies. Ireland was to exist only for the sake of England. 
 Already in the reign of Henry VIII. a law had been framed 
 forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England ; and 
 later, under Charles I., Strafford had deliberately sought to crush 
 the Irish woollen trade because it competed with the English, 
 though he strove at the same time to improve agriculture and 
 
 ^ Essay That Politics may be reduced to a scieiice. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. l6l 
 
 to promote ^ the linen manufacture. After the Restoration, the 
 repressive principle was carried to incredible lengths. 
 
 Irish commerce had prospered, despite the evil handling of 
 the land question, in the peace of the first four decades of the 
 seventeenth century, under James and Charles I. ; - and under 
 Charles II., despite execrable laws for the repression of Irish 
 commerce, there was a measure of prosperity, the natural but 
 temporary result of peace and partial freedom in a country 
 whose population had been in large part destroyed and then 
 partly replaced by new colonists, bent on making their fortunes. 
 None of it is to be credited to the English rule. Whereas 
 Cromwell's Navigation Act had left Ireland, as a matter of 
 course, on the same footing with England, the amended Act 
 of 1663 excluded her, thus depriving her of her whole colonial 
 carrying trade ^ and stopping once for all the development of 
 her shipping'* that would naturally have taken place with the 
 
 1 Strafford is sometimes credited with "founding" this manufacture (so 
 Lecky, i. 32, perhaps following the editor of Hutchinson's Commercial Re- 
 straints of Ireland, ed. 1882, p. 13) ; but there was an Irish linen trade long 
 before his time. Mr Lecky himself notes this, p. 178. Strafford's stimulus 
 came to nothing, and the trade, after being almost destroyed by English 
 hindrance after the Revolution, was re-created only by means of systematic 
 bounties in the next century from 1743 to 1773. In our day its existence is 
 often credited to "Protestant energy and enterprise." 
 
 - Not, however, to the extent alleged in Provost Hely Hutchinson's work 
 (1779) on the Commeixial Restraints <?/" /r^/a^fif— an untrustworthy perform- 
 ance, which has been unduly praised. It asserts (ed. 1882, p. 9) that the 
 customs were farmed at the beginning of Charles's reign for only ;i^50O, and 
 before his death for ^54,000,— citing Cox's History of Ireland, ii. 91. I can 
 find no such statement in Cox, who on the contrary shows that the Irish 
 customs were farmed in the twelfth year of James I. for ;i^9700, and in the 
 seventh year of Charles I. for ^31,050 [Hibernia Anglicana, ii. (1690), p. 
 68). In 1639 they were farmed for ^23,500 to Strafford and his partners, 
 who drew from them ;!f55,582. 
 •* See details in Lecky, i. 174. 
 
 ■^ One of the minor absurdities of the anti-Celtic theory is the dogma that 
 " Celts " are in virtue of their race bad sailors. As against this, it may be 
 fitting to cite the anti-Celtic Mommsen : — "Not only were the Celts, to all 
 appearance, the nation that first regularly navigated the Atlantic Ocean ; but 
 we find that the art of building and managing vessels had attained among 
 them a remarkable development " (History of Rome, B. v., ch. 7, Eng. tr., ed. 
 1894, V. 15). The seafaring capacity of the Bretons will hardly be explicitly 
 denied even by Celtophobes. As regards Ireland, it is to be noted, firstly, 
 that the square shape of the land, making land communication as a rule the 
 preferable one, would not originally develop sea-going habits as would the 
 
 L 
 
1 62 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 growth of the American colonies. Soon came another blow. 
 Ireland being pre-eminently a pastoral country, her natural 
 exports were cattle, meat, and dairy produce ; and the new settlers 
 started a vigorous trade. England was practically the only 
 accessible foreign market. But English landowners after the 
 Restoration were suffering from a fall of rents, which they attri- 
 buted to the Irish cattle trade; and in 1663 the English Parlia- 
 ment enacted that no Irish fat cattle should be imported after 
 July in each year. The Irish farmers accordingly sent lean 
 cattle, and dead meat; and the English landlords in 1665 
 enacted that neither dead nor living, fat nor lean cattle, should 
 be imported from Ireland at all. Thus was one of the primary 
 industries of the land wellnigh destroyed, as regarded foreign 
 trade ; and the English squires followed up the main blow by 
 prohibiting the import of sheep, swine, pork, bacon, mutton, 
 butter, and cheese.^ Already the exportation of raw wool to 
 foreign countries had been prohibited both in Ireland and in 
 England, by way of encouraging English manufactures ; and the 
 export of Irish wool to England had been stopped by prohibitive 
 duties in the interest of the landlords. Accordingly, as the Irish 
 woollen manufacture had not been stamped out by Strafford, it was 
 now revived, the landowners taking to sheep-raising, and the traders 
 to wool-spinning and weaving. The Duke of Ormond, then 
 Lord Lieutenant, secured that the importation of Scotch linens 
 and woollens into Ireland should be forbidden ; and he contrived 
 to bring over 500 families from Brabant, as well as a number of 
 refugees from Rochelle, to practise the linen trade ; and 500 
 Walloons to work in woollen-weaving.- Artificial hindrance was 
 
 shape of England and the coast conformation of Norway. (Cp. Richey, Short 
 History of Ireland, p. 11.) But when it became commercially profitable for 
 the inhabitants of Ireland to do so, they took to the sea as readily as the 
 Dutch and Portuguese, As to their service in the British navy, see Fox's A'ey 
 to the Irish Question, pp. 310-313. As regards Irish merchant shipping, the 
 text shows the causes of limitation. It had been rapidly increasing before 
 England intervened. Long before the Navigation Act, indeed, the English 
 Government had hampered the export trade by enacting that all ships leaving 
 Irish ports, no matter which, should call either at Cork or at Drogheda, these 
 being the only places where customs duties could be levied. Hardiman, 
 History of Galway, 1820, p. 58. Galway had a "staple" for wool and 
 leather conferred on it in 1375, but this was soon withdrawn, and customs 
 had to be paid as before at Cork. Id., p. 59. 
 
 ^ Lecky, i. 173, citing the Acts 18 Charles II., c. 2, and 32 Charles II., 
 c. 2. 
 
 "^ Ilassencamp, p. loi. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 6 
 
 J 
 
 thus, so far, successfully met ^ by artificial promotion. After the 
 Revolution, accordingly, the English Government proceeded to 
 destroy the woollen manufacture as it had done the trade in raw 
 wool. There may have been a reinforcement of commercial 
 egoism at this point by Protestant malice ; for we know that the 
 previous English dealings with the land had so forced Irish 
 Catholics into Irish trade that a great deal of it was in their 
 hands.- And this may have been a reason why, when the Irish 
 Parliament was called upon in 1698 to pass a law imposing pro- 
 hibitive export duties on Irish woollens, in the interest of 
 England, it shamefully acquiesced. That Parliament would 
 represent the Protestant landed interest, and the rotten boroughs 
 set up by James I. and his successors. In any case, its action 
 was followed up next year by an Act of the English Parliament, 
 absolutely prohibiting the export of manufactured wool from 
 Ireland to any country whatever. Thus the natural Irish 
 manufacture was deliberately destroyed in the interests of the 
 English manufacturers, as the natural Irish export trade had 
 been destroyed in the interest of the English landlords. It was 
 considerately suggested that the Irish should develop their linen 
 and hemp trade — that is, that the more factitious industry should 
 be pushed, when that had been destroyed for which the country 
 had special advantages. And after all, the English Parliament 
 imposed such prohibitive duties on Irish hemps and linens (in 
 addition to excluding certain kinds from the colonial markets) 
 that the hemp manufacture ceased and the linen trade was 
 paralysed. 
 
 Thus did Protestant and constitutional England deal by 
 Protestantised Ireland — the most deliberately wicked process of 
 injury ever inflicted on a dependency by any civilised power in 
 history. By this means were the people of Ireland, " Celtic " 
 and "Teutonic," Catholic and Protestant alike, once more 
 struck down into an inferno of misery, when they had been 
 
 ' Thomas Sheridan, writing in 1677, notes that the Acts designed to injure 
 the Irish cattle trade, navigation, and colonial trade, had caused a vast in- 
 crease in the woollen and linen manufacture, and in the shipping trade with 
 the Continent ; the export of beef, tallow, hides, butter, and wool having 
 alone yielded more profit latterly than they and the cattle trade formerly did 
 together. Discourse on the Rise and Power of Parliaments, in vol. entitleil 
 Some Revelations in Irisli History, edited by Saxe Bannister, London, 1S70, 
 p. 142. 
 
 -Petty, Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1699, p. 186. I'etty ingeniously 
 argues that everywhere throughout the world, the heterodox and boycotted 
 religionists tend to do the bulk of the trading. 
 
164 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 making rapid progress in wealth and civilisation. Compared 
 with the chronic famine of the eighteenth century, the massacres 
 of the old time begin to seem inconsiderable episodes. The 
 penal laws against the Catholics did whatever else was necessary 
 to make the mass of the people the most ignorant and degraded 
 population in northern Europe. The stronger spirits had fled to 
 other lands, where they developed political gifts not excelled 
 in the nation which had exiled them from their own, taking a 
 brilliant part in the higher civilisation of Europe while their 
 supplanters lived in bigoted ignorance.^ Instead, however, of 
 spending any fresh indignation on a procedure which beggars all 
 invective, let us now simply state in a concise and schematic way 
 what had been done, sociologically speaking, to Irish life, institu- 
 tions, and habits, and how what was actually done contrasts with 
 what could and would have been done by a fairly benevolent and 
 fairly intelligent government. 
 
 1. Ireland being pre-eminently pastoral, it was necessary for 
 its progress in civilisation that agriculture and other forms of 
 industry should be developed.- A woollen manufacture would 
 develop industry on the most advantageous lines ; and an in- 
 dustrial population would stimulate agriculture by making a new 
 market for produce. On the contrary the woollen trade was as 
 far as possible suppressed ; as was the linen trade, for which 
 there was less primary advantage ; and the population were thus 
 thrown back on pasturage, yet at the same time refused the 
 natural market for their cattle and pastoral produce. 
 
 2. The land being thus made the one sphere of industry for 
 the people, it was highly expedient that that at least should be 
 put under a wise system of law, promotive of industry and amity. 
 Cultivation being backward, the peasantry should have been put 
 in a position encouraging to industry. On the contrary, there 
 had been forced on the land an alien landlord class, hostile in 
 religion and prejudice to the common people ; and the acquisi- 
 tion of land by men of their own religion was zealously prevented. 
 
 1 Cp. Macaulay, History of England, ch. xvii., end. 
 
 - It is worth noting that Spenser, a hundred years before, had insisted on 
 the social need for an addition of agriculture to pasturage in Ireland. "This 
 keeping of cowes," says the Irenceus of his dialogue, " is of itselfe a veiye idle 
 life, and a fitt nurserye of a theefe. . . . To say truth, though Ireland be by 
 nature counted a great soyle of pasture, yet had I rather have fewer cowes 
 kept, and men better mannered, than to have such huge encrease of cattell, 
 and noe encrease of good conditions" {View, in Globe ed., p. 678). This 
 gives the gist of the sociological corrective to the economic doctrine of absolute 
 laissez-faire. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 65 
 
 There were thus a deep gulf between the landlords and the 
 labourers, the former being thus developed as a matter of course 
 into one of the most insolent and worthless aristocracies in the 
 modern world,^ while the people, made indolent by the hope- 
 lessness of their case, had artificial abasement added to their 
 disadvantages. 
 
 3. For a peasantry so placed, the one moral antidote would 
 be some measure of education. But the penal law expressly 
 prevented Catholic education. That law was, as Burke decided 
 in his Conservative period, " a machine of wise and elaborate 
 contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverish- 
 ment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them 
 of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted 
 ingenuity of man."- 
 
 4. The mass of the Irish people having been made hostile 
 in religion to that prevailing in England, the interest of the 
 latter, when once the period of anti-Papal panic was past, would 
 have been to conciliate them by toleration, and so do something 
 to attract them to Protestantism and win them away from the 
 influence of their priests. At the same time, whatever measures- 
 would maintain the Protestant population should have been taken 
 as a matter of course. But on the one hand the penal laws 
 were maintained in the full knowledge that they rooted the 
 people more and more firmly in their Catholicism and in their 
 devotion to their priests ; and on the other hand the trade laws 
 were maintained in the full knowledge that by multiplying poverty 
 they forced thousands of the Protestant descendants of the 
 English and Scotch settlers to emigrate, the native stocks being 
 better able to live on beggarly sustenance. 
 
 5. A people thus situated, with no outlet save difficult emigra^ 
 tion, with its trade of every description artificially repressed, 
 tended to suffer in a peculiar degree from over-population ; and 
 extra misery on this score could only be averted by their learning 
 in some way the lesson of family limitation. But no modern 
 nation had as yet learned the lesson ; and the Irish peasantry, 
 instead of being in any way helped in the right direction, were 
 specially pushed in the wrong. On the one hand, the land 
 system, putting them as it did at the absolute mercy of their 
 landlords, created shiftlessness as a morass breeds miasma ; on 
 the other hand, the anti-Catholic laws had the peculiar effect of 
 
 ' Cp. Smith, Wealth of Nations, B. v., ch. 3, near end. 
 
 - Letter to Lam^rishe, Works, Bohn e<l.. iii. 343. Cp. other venlicts cited by 
 Lecky, i. 170 
 
1 66 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 making the priesthood wholly dependent on the ecclesiastical 
 fees paid at births, marriages, and confessions ; and the priests 
 accordingly encouraged early marriages and large families as a 
 matter of course.^ Further, the introduction of the potato sup- 
 plied the people with the cheapest and most rapidly multiphable 
 food that can be grown in northern Europe ; and the utter lack 
 of industry and of scientific agriculture left them to be attracted 
 by such food to an extent seen in no other European country. 
 Thus population increased at the highest European rate and at 
 the lowest conceivable standard of comfort and culture. Finally, 
 as if these stimuli were not sufficient, there came yet another. As 
 soon as the creation of a small freehold franchise in 1793 made it 
 possible for landowners to drive a trade in votes, they commenced 
 multiplying small holdings, thus encouraging young people to 
 marry at an earlier age than ever. So that the most rapid and 
 fatal increase of population — that occurring between 1793 and 
 the famine, was specially the result of the promotive action of the 
 landlords, who afterwards charged the sin of over-population on 
 the people themselves, as a matter of " race." 
 
 In fine, there was such a perfect coherence of evil in the con- 
 ditions of Irish life for a hundred years that the marvel is, not 
 that the people were backward, but that they yet made the pro- 
 gress they did in the towns. It was said by Sir John Davies of 
 the old system of coyne and livery that it would " ruin hell, if set 
 up in the kingdom of Beelzebub." It might be said of the far 
 more comprehensive machinery of demoralisation under notice 
 that it would ruin heaven, with a population of saints. That any 
 species of civilisation at all survived under such conditions would 
 seem to prove that the " race " was in itself superior and not 
 inferior to others. For, as we have noted, one result of the 
 chronic famine and wretchedness of the eighteenth century was 
 that the Protestant and " non-Celtic " inhabitants were in large 
 part starved out.- This turning of Irish misfortune to the visible 
 
 ^ This factor in Irish sociology, ignored by most historians, is well set forth 
 by Newenham in his Statistical and Historical Inqitiry into the Progress and 
 Magnitude of t/ie Population of Ireland, 1 805, a work written independently 
 of that of Malthus. See pp. 18-28. Compare the later testimony of the work 
 Ireland as a Kingdom and a Colony, by " Brian Borohnie," 1843, p. lOO. 
 
 2 This fact, which is fully set forth by Mr Lecky (i. 245-248) goes far to 
 countervail the conclusion to which he and others have come, that in half of 
 Ireland the " Saxon and Scotch " elements of race preponderate. As against 
 the chronic influx of English into Ireland, there has to be set the constant 
 efflux, from the "conquest" onwards. The statement of Sir John Davies 
 {Discovery, p. 2) that in his day (1612) there were more people of English 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 67 
 
 disadvantage of England was doubtless one of the considerations 
 that at length caused a slackening of the English effort to make 
 Ireland wretched. The thousands who emigrated from Ireland 
 to the American colonies were found to be ready promoters of 
 the Rebellion there ; ^ and the growing signs of revived disaffec- 
 tion in Ireland,- especially among the Protestant population, forced 
 the concession of octennial elections in 1768. Even the ruin of 
 the Irish woollen trade had partly injured the trade of England, 
 for the Irish had been driven to smuggling their wool to the 
 Continent, and necessarily took goods in return, ceasing to buy 
 from England to that extent ; so that there had been already a 
 lightening of the laws against Irish trade. And when in 1782 
 the Volunteers were visibly masters of the situation, and the 
 Irish Parliament claimed independence, it obtained with that the 
 withdrawal of all the principal trade restraints. But the general 
 lesson was yet far too imperfectly learned to permit of the im- 
 proved disposition of England standing the test of the panic 
 after the French Revolution, heightened by that of a French 
 invasion; and when in 1798 the Catholic population sought to 
 secure their liberties as the Protestants had secured theirs, the 
 undying religious enmity soon sufficed to embroil the masses in 
 an abominable struggle, undoing all that had been wrought by 
 rational philosophy towards the ending of intolerance among the 
 more educated. As of old, the Catholics did bloody deeds, and 
 the Protestants did bloodier, the suppression of rebellion being 
 more lawless than rebellion itself. Not from ignorant Catholics 
 and rabid Protestants could the political solution come ; neither 
 
 than of native race, cannot well be accepted ; neither can the similar state- 
 ment in the Remonstrance against Strafford in 1640. The assertors of these 
 things had no means of accurate knowing ; they seem to have counted im- 
 migration without deducting remigration ; and they seem to have assumed 
 further that all clansmen of the name of Burke must be descended from the 
 Norman De Burghs, and so on. Thus Spenser assumes ( Vie7v, as cited, p. 
 637) that the MacMahons are all of the Norman family of the Fitz-Ursulas, of 
 whose name MacMahon was the translation. But tribesmen would constantly 
 take the name of their chief without being of his family. On the other hand 
 it is abundantly clear that whatever elements of suceptibility to bad conditions 
 existed in the pre-Norman stocks of the island were at least equally great in 
 the immigrant English stocks, from first to last. Cp. Lecky, i. 400-401. 
 
 ^ Cp. liouverie-Pusey, Fast History of Ire/and, 1894, p. 85. 
 
 - Mr Bouverie-Pusey (p. 82) has summed-up that four movements begin about 
 1760 : one by the upper-class Protestants, against English oppression ; one by 
 the Protestant masses against the classes ; one by the upper-class Catholics, for 
 freedom ; and one by the Catholic masses for betterment of life. 
 
1 68 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 could the form of a Union, carried out by men without the spirit 
 of union on either side, produce the unifying results that its 
 promoters had promised. Another generation had to pass before 
 the fear of fresh revolt could wring from the English ruling class 
 the concession of Catholic Emancipation ; and the lapse of a 
 whole century was to leave Ireland still wretched, still disaffected, 
 still misgoverned, still backward in civilisation. 
 
 In our own century, however, the essentials of the Irish 
 problem have gradually forced themselves so far on the con- 
 science and intelligence of the British public that the friends of 
 democracy may at last take hope to see the way opened for a real 
 rectification. The disappointment of hopes too lightly formed 
 becomes at length a force of enlightenment. Those who had 
 counted on curing the Irish trouble by Catholic Emancipation 
 had to learn that there existed conditions of economic evil as well 
 as of moral. New distress bred new disorder, always met by the 
 old remedy of the bludgeon ; till we sicken of the endless story of 
 Coercion Acts. At length there fell the overwhelming blow of the 
 potato famine, a deadly demonstration that with religious freedom 
 a miseducated and misdeveloped people could still live on the 
 verge of an abyss, and could be well-nigh engulfed therein. After 
 the very stress of famine had seemingly relieved the remaining 
 population, there came a further disillusioning. The new sedition 
 of Fenianism arose to show well-intentioned Englishmen that the 
 mere leaving of things alone could not cancel the heritage of 
 injustice left in Ireland by their fathers. 
 
 "An appalling famine, followed by an unexampled and continuous 
 emigration, had, by thinning the labour market, alleviated that extreme 
 indigence which, by making the people desperate, might embitter 
 them, we thought, even against a mild and just Government. Ireland 
 was now not only well governed, but prosperous and improving. 
 Surely the troubles of the British nation about Ireland were now at 
 an end."^ 
 
 But all of a sudden came the explosion of Fenianism, "unlooked 
 for and unintelligible," startling the people of England into panic. 
 " That disaffection which they flattered themselves had been 
 cured, suddenly grows more intense, more violent, more un- 
 scrupulous, and more universal than ever." The prompt con- 
 cessions of Mr Gladstone's Government, the Disestablishment of 
 the Irish Church and the partial improvement of the land laws, 
 did but serve to make further concessions inevitable. The case 
 
 ^ J. S. Mill, England and Ireland, p. 5, 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 169 
 
 had been only superficially diagnosed. As Mill said : " The | 
 difficulty of governing Ireland lies entirely in our own minds ; it 
 is an incapability of understanding." ^ And yet there had latterly 
 been an effort to understand, as Mill avowed. 
 
 " If there is anythiny sadder than the calamity itself, it is the un- 
 mistakeable sincerity and good faith with which numbers of English- 
 men confess themselves incapable of comprehending it. They know 
 not that the disaffection which neither has nor needs any other motive 
 than aversion to her rulers, is the climax to a long growth of disaffec- 
 tion arising from causes that might have been removed. What seems 
 to them the causelessness of the Irish repugnance to our rule, is the 
 proof that they have almost let pass the last opportunity they are ever 
 likely to have of setting it right. They have allowed what once was 
 indignation against particular wrongs, to harden into a passionate 
 determination to be no longer ruled by those to whom they ascribe all 
 their evils.'" '" 
 
 This was and is substantially true; and the present Irish problem 
 may be definitively stated under two aspects. There is first of 
 all the clear need for certain great political innovations in Ireland, 
 to the end of rectifying evils of old standing ; and there is further 
 the no less clear necessity that the Irish people be now left to 
 work out the solution for themselves, since the English governing 
 cla§s has not only failed utterly to achieve it in the past but is 
 unable, in virtue of its own relation to social problems, to catch 
 up with the developments of the Irish situation as they arise. 
 For the economic situation changes from time to time, with the 
 changes which go on so rapidly in the economic adjustments of 
 the modern world ; and a new Land Bill has hardly had time to 
 be tried before it needs to be supplemented. It is not difficult, 
 in view of past and recent history, to constate the main elements 
 in the constructive problem ; and they may be thus summarised. 
 
 1. Ireland is still in very large measure a pastoral country, 
 the climate being less advantageous for the growth of cereals 
 than those of the countries which chiefly produce these for the 
 world's markets. But, 
 
 2. As of old, Ireland needs agriculture and industry to broaden 
 the bases of her civilisation ; and in order to develop these there 
 must (a) be withdrawn the hindrance of perpetual friction between 
 the idle rent-drawing class and the cultivators, and there must 
 (/'') be supplied some encouragements to industrial production. 
 
 3. The landlord system still remains economically irrational 
 
 ^ England and Ireland , p. 41. -Id., p. 6. 
 
lyO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 and morally outrageous ; and the country cannot conceivably 
 prosper while it subsists. Irish agriculture needs the application 
 of a great deal of capital to bring it abreast of that of other 
 countries, which had gone on developing while everything Irish 
 was kept in forced stagnation. A high authority has calculated 
 that to put Irish soil, area for area, on an equality with that of 
 other countries, there was needed, a generation ago, the enormous 
 outlay of ;^3 20,000,000.^ The third part of that sum will never 
 be applied in a sufficiently short period under the present system. 
 There is needed a new arrangement, under which labour shall 
 ' be applied zealously and abundantly, and capital on the strength 
 of the labour. 
 
 4. The country further needs the industrial development which 
 f. it was wilfully prevented from making at the beginning of last 
 
 century. Englishmen, among other vain judgments on the Irish 
 (k question, sometimes set down to " Celtic indolence " that lack of 
 manufactures which their own ancestors strove to bring about. 
 The simple facts that English capitalism had so completely 
 got the start, in the matter of the woollen manufacture for in- 
 stance, and that Irish shipping had been so utterly destroyed 
 by the Navigation Acts while that of England was multiplying, 
 would alone constitute a tremendous hindrance to fresh Irish 
 development, even if Ireland stood nearly equal with England 
 in the matter of coal supply, which unhappily she does not. 
 The denudation of her coal measures in the geologic past was 
 another of her predestinate misfortunes ; and to enable her to 
 live industrially alongside of English competition there will be 
 needed either the employment of a new fuel, or another motive 
 power than steam, or a stimulation of trade by which she can 
 profitably import fuel. 
 
 5. One of the most obvious natural advantages of Ireland, in 
 modern times, is her situation as between England and the United 
 States. Had this advantage been permitted development, there 
 would have existed ere this an extensive trade and passenger ser- 
 vice between the States and the Irish Atlantic coast ; but to 
 develop it now there would be needed special outlay, English 
 capitalistic competition being able to crush or check any private 
 enterprise of the kind. 
 
 6. Unless the habit of rapid family multiplication be checked,^ 
 
 ' Lavergne, Econoinie rurale de PAngleterre, etc., edit. 1882, p. 370. 
 
 - Mr Bonar has pointed (MaUhus and his Work, p. 205) to the fact that 
 "even in 1875 the Registrar-General's Report showed that there were then 
 fewer marriages in Ireland than in England, in proportion to population, and 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. I71 
 
 the Irish peasantry must needs remain poor under any system. 
 Perpetual forced emigration and perpetual decline of population 
 mean perpetual failure to solve the problem of good government 
 and right living. But there is little prospect of the Irish people 
 learning the lesson of family prudence while the priesthood 
 retains its present social philosophy and its present influence; 
 and this it will certainly do while Ireland remains subject to 
 English coercion. Even the later schemes of tenant-purchase 
 offer no prospect of such a bestowal of land on the people as 
 might modify their habits in the direction of those of the 
 peasantry of Erance. 
 
 This, in short, is the formula of the case under every aspect : 
 there will be no solution under English rule. The English 
 people have not spare power of attention enough to master the 
 changing Irish problem ; and the English upper classes will 
 always resist measures which point to the transformation of that 
 social order under which they hold their wealth and status. The 
 Conservative course is to go on offering a few palliatives in alter- 
 nation with measures of coercion, letting the productive power of 
 the country steadily dwindle. It is a noteworthy fact that the 
 only two periods in modern Irish history when Irish industry and 
 wealth went forward were (i) that after the Restoration, before 
 the worst of the trade laws, when new capital and new blood 
 developed the natural resources and trade of the land, and (2) 
 that of the independent Parliament of the end of last century, 
 when Irish agriculture and trade were artificially promoted, as 
 was absolutely necessary after a century of artificial depression. 
 That Parliament by its bounties on the exports of grain instantly 
 created employment for idle capital and labour in all directions, 
 
 that they came later.''' He also points to the 1882 report, pp. 18, 19. The 
 same statement holds good for more recent years, there being in 1890, for 
 instance, only 20,990 marriages in a population of 4,681,173, while in England 
 in 1891 there were 226,025 marriages in a population of 29,081,147. With a 
 little over six times the Irish population, England had nearly eleven times the 
 number of marriages. But this disparity is clearly to be explained by the 
 emigration of so many young Irish people to the United States, to Scotland, 
 to England and the colonies, where the people of Irish descent multiply, 
 while the population of Ireland has steadily decreased since the potato famine, 
 till it is now little more than that of Scotland. Between 1853 and 1891 there 
 emigrated to the States alone 2,395,283 Irish, as against 2,107,324 English. 
 This degree of relief cannot go on forever ; and in any case, though the Irish 
 decrease represents to a certain extent a raised standard of comfort in the 
 remaining population, it also represents the perpetual pressure of poverty, and 
 an absolute decline in the wealth-production of the country. 
 
172 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 and employment of a kind which tended directly to raise the 
 people. In comparison with this service to civilisation, the 
 financial vices of its membership are really of small account, 
 especially when we remember that the Castle administration had 
 been one long process of shameless jobbery, the poor Irish 
 revenues being charged not only with a multitude of sinecures 
 but with endless pensions to men who had served not the Irish 
 but the English Government. If even a corrupt Home Rule 
 Parliament, giving but an imperfect representation of the mass of 
 the people, could thus effectively aid them, in comparison with 
 the worse than impotence of the rule of the English Ministry, 
 there is at least a preliminary presumption in favour of a resump- 
 tion of the method. Mr Lecky, after showing consciously and 
 unconsciously that every form of sedition and discontent in 
 previous centuries was a natural and substantially justified protest 
 against bad government, breaks out, in his capacity of contem- 
 porary partisan, into hoarse vituperation against the agitators of 
 to-day as a new and inexcusable species of malcontents. It is, 
 he declares,^ 
 
 "grotesquely absurd to suppose that the merits or demerits, the 
 failure or success of the old Irish Parliament, has any real bearing on 
 modern schemes for reconstructing the government of Ireland on a 
 revolutionary and Jacobin basis ; entrusting the protection of property 
 and the maintenance of law to some democratic assembly consisting 
 mainly of Fenians and Land Leaguers, of paid agitators and of 
 penniless adventurers." 
 
 The tone here tells its own tale of passion and unreason, with 
 which it is useless to argue. The logical implication of the 
 passage is that the Irish people, when given a hold on their own 
 land, will deliberately elect a legislative body of quite lawless 
 and untrustworthy representatives, penniless or pennied, for the 
 sheer love of ructions. When elderly gentlemen talk in this 
 apoplectic way about " democratic assemblies " in England, their 
 antecedents do not secure for them more than the tolerance of 
 compassion ; and even Mr Lecky's historical services cannot win 
 him a respectful hearing when he thus passes from history to 
 vaticination. As has been said above,- he is in a fair way to be 
 driven by partisan bias, after all his rationalism concerning race, 
 to the good old creed that race qualities are the source of all 
 Irish evil. We have seen more than enough in the foregoing 
 
 ' History of Ireland in the \%th Ccntin-y, ii. 501. 
 - Preamble. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISEI HISTORY. 1 73 
 
 survey to deliver us, if we be capable of scientific thought, from 
 the worship of that idol of the tribe. If the average of Irish^ 
 men were at any period in any way behind the average of their 
 neighbours, we can see that it was their conditions that had made 
 them so. If they were or are more superstitious, it is because 
 they had been longer kept ignorant. If in last century their 
 educated class was corrupt and unstable and riotous, and their 
 lower class alternately abject and brutal, it is because the per- 
 petual uncertainty of life and government, the denial of all the 
 natural opportunities of self-development, and the imposition of 
 every possible demoralising bond and demoralising bribe, had 
 unhinged all moral conditions ; because the strongest types had 
 been driven forth ; and because under English rule duplicity and 
 servility were means to fortune. If in a later age the mass of the 
 peasantry were indolent or even untruthful, it was because the 
 systematic filching away of the fruits of their best labour by the 
 idle landowner had made industry seem the vanity of vanities, 
 and because there was no social and intellectual atmosphere in ' 
 which the virtue of veracity could grow.^ If Irishmen are still 
 in the mass somewhat more excitable than Englishmen in the 
 mass, it is because their country has never during three hundred 
 years passed two generations without either civil strife or murder- 
 ous famine, shaking the nerves and wringing the hearts of the 
 mothers and fathers, and stamping the heritage on their children, 
 whose very cradles were rocked to sobs and dirges.^ Never 
 within historic times has a generation of Irish been free to grow 
 up prosperously and placidly, and to transmit stability of habit 
 to the next. 
 
 But wherever Irish people in any number, of whatever pre- 
 sumed descent or ethnic affinity, have been free to profit by 
 their industry, they have proved themselves in mass as indus- 
 trious as the best ; and wherever they have had free access to 
 culture, unchecked either by Catholic priest or Protestant pastor " 
 
 ^ It should be noted, in this connection, that Tourguenief has dehberately 
 pronounced the peasantry of Russia to be habitually untruthful ; and that 
 Mill no less deliberately passed the same judgment on the English working- 
 class. It would be worth while, instead of vending afresh the old fatuities 
 about race qualities, to make a close comparison as between the upper and 
 lower classes of all countries, and to seek for the causal factors. 
 
 - I leave this proposition standing, in the knowledge that it will be disputed 
 by the school of Weismann. The record that in times of revolution in Paris 
 the number of premature births and of neurotic cases has always been found 
 to increase, must be held to outweigh thus far a doctrine mainly founded on 
 the observation of the heredities of butterflies and rabbits. 
 
174 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 and master, they have shown themselves at least as quick of 
 intellect and as sound of judgment as the average of civilised 
 mankind. Between Protestant and Catholic fanaticism, they are 
 still relatively under-educated ; and even as regards their own 
 history, on which they are supposed to brood unprofitably, they 
 are still in the main unstudious. Not a generation ago, one of 
 their best historians wrote : — 
 
 " In every system of national education on the Continent the history 
 of their native country is considered a necessary subject of instruction 
 for the young. . . . The case is otherwise in Ireland. The young of 
 this country are left in absolute ignorance of the history of their fore- 
 fathers. There do not even exist books suitable for instruction in this 
 department. The indifference of the middle classes upon this subject 
 is so great, that no author with a reasonable prospect of success 
 attempts to publish an Irish history. Two reasons are alleged for 
 this anomaly. We are told that a knowledge of Irish history is 
 dangerous ; and further that the history itself is useless and un- 
 interesti?igP ^ 
 
 This was said after there had been plenty of the signs and fruits 
 of national renascence. If it needed a generation of Home Rule 
 agitation to create a more intellectual frame of mind, that agita- 
 tion will have been only the more wholesome. But the fact thus 
 set forth might alone serve to show that the Irish demand is not 
 a product of sentimentalism and of the outcry of " paid agitators," 
 but an outcome of the constant and grinding pressure of a vital 
 practical need. The people demand Home Rule because they 
 feel their affairs will never go well without it ; and we have lately 
 seen a Unionist Government forced rather to offend its land- 
 owning adherents than the tenantry of Ulster, who stand for 
 land reform as emphatically as those of the rest of Ireland. Said 
 a Unionist observer in Ulster ten years ago : 
 
 " If the seciarian element were eliminated^ there would scarcely be less 
 discontent in the North than in the other portions of Ireland. The land 
 question is just as pressing here as it is elsewhere ; and there is not 
 very much to choose between the city of Donegal and the city of 
 Cork." 2 
 
 ^ Richey, Lectures on the History of Ireland, 1869, p. i. It was doubtless 
 because of the conviction here expressed that these Lectures, and the post- 
 humous Short History of Ireland in which they are re-embodied, were printed 
 in such small number that both are now long out of print, and procurable 
 second-hand only at exorbitant prices — a most unfortunate thing for the Irish 
 cause. 
 
 - Notes on Ireland, by J. B, Greene, 1886, p. 54. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 75 
 
 And the same onlooker has preserved the remark of an Orange- 
 man " that he was ready to walk as many miles in a day as 
 any man to shoot a Papist^ but all the same he 2va?ited his land 
 cheap." ^ The " cheap " does not suggest the strongest of moral 
 positions, but it points to the root of the matter. At the same 
 time, the rest of the utterance, so characteristic, so edifying, 
 points to the great drawback of the Irish cause. To-day as of 
 old, religion is the great sunderer, the great poisoner of hearts 
 and thwarter of hopes. The Protestant clergy of Ulster are free 
 to take credit to themselves for having cherished and fostered 
 the worst growth of religious malignity that can now be seen in 
 all Christendom; for having kept alive a brutalising hatred between 
 two sections of the Irish people, and for having produced one of 
 the most odious types of citizen in the three kingdoms. The 
 spectacle presented to-day by Christian Belfast, where Protestants 
 and Catholics live in separate streets, and where one of either 
 sect venturing to try to live among the other is promptly " fired 
 out," supplies a precious testimony to the civilising virtue of 
 Christianity. It will certainly not be easy for reason and science 
 to countervail all that. 
 
 But if the opponents of Irish Home Rule hope, as so many 
 unworthily do, in virtue of this element of sheer evil, to thwart 
 for ever the demand of the majority ; or if they hope, as others 
 more worthily do, that some compromise in the matter of the 
 land laws will secure the same end, they have probably mis- 
 calculated, for the following reasons. 
 
 Firstly, even peasant proprietorship is now a belated solution 
 of the Irish agrarian problem : the scientific solution must go 
 further ; and the English ruling class are still far in the rear 
 of even the solution of peasant proprietorship. Only an Irish 
 Parliament can be looked-to to come abreast of the case. 
 
 Secondly, prolonged religious strife tends ultimately, in despite 
 of all priesthoods, to generate a recoil from zealotry and to dis- 
 credit the theme. It did so in France, in respect of the Wars 
 of the League ; it did so in Germany in respect of the Thirty 
 Years War; it did so in England in respect of the Civil War. 
 The same tendency holds good of non-military antagonism. 
 Orangeism, then, cannot forever sunder the Irish population. 
 
 Thirdly, all clear-headed Englishmen must ere long have begun 
 to see that the priest-rule which they apprehend as dangerous to 
 a self-governed Ireland can only be averted by the very operation 
 of self-government — that so long as Irishmen are collectively 
 
 ' Notes on Ireland, p. 55. 
 
J 76 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 pitted against English rule they will in the main be at one with 
 their priesthood, and that their way to undermine priestly power 
 is just to leave the people to their own natural divisions of 
 interest and character. 
 
 Fourthly, it is becoming clear even to English and Irish 
 capitahsts, as it has long been clear to American, that there is no 
 chance of fruitful application of capital to Irish concerns under 
 the present system of false-union, which keeps up chronic un- 
 certainty and diffidence. Under a Home Rule Parliament, 
 plenty of Irish-American capital, to name no other, would be 
 ready to flow into Ireland, for the development of her resources 
 and her advantages, to the gain of the English as well as her own 
 people. 
 
 Against these considerations, prejudice and hallucination can 
 hardly hold out forever. All reasonable hopes are on the side 
 of the new plan as against the old, under which Irish life has for 
 ages been a mere history of failure and downfall. And what 
 Mill said a generation ago may now be said with a more obvious 
 truth and a firmer confidence : 
 
 "■Rebellions are never really unconquerable tmtil they have become 
 rebellions for an idea. Revolt against practical ill-usage may be 
 quelled by concessions ; but wait till all practical grievances have 
 merged in the demand for independence, and there is no knowing 
 that any concession, short of independence, will appease the quarrel."^ 
 
 With no less truth we may say again, with the same humane and 
 sagacious politician : 
 
 '■ Let our statesmen be assured that now, when the long-deferred day 
 of Fenianism has come, nothing which is not accepted by the Irish 
 tenantry as a permanent solution of the land difficulty will prevent 
 Fenianism, or somethiftg equivalent to it^ from being the standing 
 torment of the English Government and people. If without removing 
 this difficulty we attempt to hold Ireland by force, it will be at the 
 expense of all the character we possess as lovers and maintainers of 
 free government, or respecters of any rights except our own ; it will 
 most dangerously aggravate all our chances of misunderstandings with 
 any of the great powers of the world, culminating in war ; we shall be 
 in a state of open revolt against the universal conscience of Europe 
 and Christendom, and more and more against our own." 2 
 
 It only remains to consider at a little further length the last of 
 these propositions. 
 
 1 England and Ireland, p. 7. - /'/. , p. 44. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 77 
 
 5j 3. The Verdict of Europe. 
 
 While the English view of the Irish problem was obscured as 
 we have seen, generation after generation, by the fumes of one 
 English passion after another — now commercial greed, now 
 religious hate ; now selfish enmity, now rancorous fear — foreign 
 onlookers, whether or not they hated England, could easily see 
 the case for what it was, absolutely about the worst, and relatively 
 the very worst spectacle of misgovernment in Europe. Nothing 
 could avail more surely to undo the prestige of England, as the 
 land of free institutions, than the picture of their perversion to 
 the constant oppression of Ireland. Foreign critics took it as 
 giving the force of an axiom to the loose generalisation of Montes- 
 quieu's school, that the dependencies of free States are always 
 worse governed than those of autocracies. And the few English- 
 men who could rise above the vulgar self-satisfaction of their 
 fellows, realising this, vainly sought long ago to open their 
 fellows' eyes. " There is not," said Earl Grey in the House of 
 Lords fifty years ago,^ "there is not a foreigner, no matter 
 whence he comes, be it from France, Russia, Germany, or 
 America, — there is no native of any foreign country, different as 
 their forms of government may be, who visits Ireland, and who 
 on his return does not congratulate himself that he sees nothing 
 comparable with the condition of that country at home." 
 
 That testimony holds perfectly good to-day. If the people of 
 England, or a majority of them, fail to realise the part their 
 ancestors and themselves have played towards Ireland, the 
 peoples of Europe realise it very fully. When Mr Gladstone 
 said that the voice of civilised Europe declared for Home 
 Rule, even his own party hardly realised the force of the 
 phrase. It passed for a rhetorical generalisation, resting on 
 the hearsay of newspaper correspondents and the civilities of 
 travellers. But it can be justified by a long series of grave and 
 well-studied treatises, representing all shades of European 
 opinion. 
 
 In the middle fifty years of this century no French name 
 stood higher in English opinion than that of de Tocqueville,- the 
 author of Democracy in A}?ierica. It stood for a sagacious blend of 
 Liberalism and Conservatism, for cool judgment, for thoughtful 
 
 1 Speech of 23rd March, 1846, cited by Mr Fox, Key to the Irish Question, 
 p. 322. 
 
 2 Still cited by Mr A. V. Dicey as a " profound observer" (^ Leap m the 
 Dark, 1893, p. 112). 
 
 M 
 
1 /S THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 scrutiny, for honourable action. And it was the friend and comrade 
 of de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, his companion and 
 colleague in the United States, whither they went to report 
 officially on the penitentiary system there in force, — it was de 
 Beaumont who, fifty-seven years ago, drew up one of the solidest 
 works theretofore written on the Irish problem, a work in which 
 the English mismanagement of that problem is dispassionately and 
 unanswerably set forth. That work represented the opinion of 
 de Tocqueville's school in Europe. But at the same period an 
 onlooker from another nation, of another school of thought, 
 the Conservative Prussian von Raumer, came substantially to 
 Beaumont's conclusions. De Beaumont criticised von Raumer's 
 doctrine as revolutionary; but the two writers, as Mill later noted, 
 offered practically the same prescription. He might have added 
 that M. de Sismondi, a Liberal French economist of another 
 school than his own, put the prescription still more emphatically. 
 And while French Liberalism and Prussian Toryism were thus 
 practically at one, French Catholicism chimed in. The more 
 liberal side of that Catholicism was well represented by the 
 Comte de Montalembert, the friend of Lacordaire ; and the 
 Comte de Montalembert, after actually seeing O'Connell at work 
 in Ireland in his youth, could in his old age write of Lacordaire 
 as " this liberal who has been among us the descendant and the 
 continuator of Saint Dominic, of Bossuet, and of O^Co}ine/L"^ 
 I do not say that this estimate is a wise or judicial one, but it 
 shows how the school of Lacordaire and Montalembert felt. 
 Later, we have from Father Adolphe Perraud - two large volumes 
 of Etudes siir Vlrlande Contemporaine (1862), a work published 
 with a preface by the then Bishop of Orleans, and appealing to 
 the orthodox Catholicism of France. Here we have a really 
 industrious research, drawing on English official documents and 
 all manner of English and Irish testimonies. The book is of 
 course zealously Catholic, but it does not rely on mere clerical 
 allocution to carry its point. On the contrary, it supplies to all 
 classes of French readers an amount of exact insight into modern 
 English discussion over and mismanagement of Ireland that they 
 could have obtained in no other way. Such a book, following 
 on de Beaumont's, must have convinced nine out of every ten 
 Frenchmen who read it, be they Catholic or freethinking, that 
 whatever may have been the truth as to Irish grievances in 
 previous centuries, in this century they were the result of English 
 
 1 Un Maine an XIX' Sur/e, ed. 1881, p. 3. 
 
 '^ Afterwards Bishop of Autun, and member of tlie .\cademie Francaise (1882). 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 179 
 
 tyranny, English selfishness, and English unintelligence. Mont- 
 alembert might seem to many an extravagant zealot, but Father 
 Perraud could not be so set aside ; and he had de Beaumont's 
 treatise behind him. Nor did he lack other French corrobora- 
 tion. Besides the documented treatises of de Beaumont and 
 himself there had appeared a series of works on Ireland by 
 French observers, such as the Lettres sur rirlande of M. 
 Duvergier de Hauranne, and Blrlande, by MM. Chavanne de 
 la Girandiere and Huillard-Breholles, all bringing home to the 
 intelligence of Europe the immense failure and wrong of English 
 rule in Ireland. After the work of Monseigneur Perraud there 
 appeared, in 1863, the revised and extended edition of that of 
 de Beaumont, with a new Notice sur Fetat present de rir/a/ide, 
 still summing up against England, though without a scintilla of 
 anti-English prejudice. 
 
 And still the play of criticism goes on. The Irish problem, 
 alas ! has survived the efforts of the English Liberalism of the 
 last generation to solve it — efforts partly stimulated by foreign 
 criticism, but never rising to the task in the fashion of the foreign 
 reformers whose work had been held up to them as an example. 
 Von Raumer, the Prussian Conservative, insisted that the woes 
 of Ireland could never be cured save by turning the tenants into 
 peasant proprietors. That was in effect what had been accom- 
 plished in Prussia in the previous generation by the measures of 
 von Stein and Hardenberg — or, as von Raumer always puts it, 
 of the King, Frederick William III. Here is his whole prescrip- 
 tion : — 
 
 1. Provision for the schools and churches of the Protestants 
 and Catholics equally, out of existing church property or new 
 endowments. 
 
 2. Abolition of tithes. 
 
 3. Poor laws (though opposed by O'Connell), but free of the 
 blemishes of the English. 
 
 4. Special taxation of absentees by poor-rates. 
 
 5. "The complete abolition of the system of tenants at will, 
 and the conversion of all these tenants at will into proprietors." 
 
 " On reading this," says von Raumer, " the Tories will throw 
 my book into the fire ; and even the Whigs will be mute with 
 astonishment. The whole battery, of 'pillage,' 'jacobinism,' 
 'dissolution of civil society,' is discharged at me. . . . Even the 
 Radicals ask, with astonishment, how I would work this miracle. 
 There is a ' Sibylline ' book, a patent and yet hidden mystery, 
 how this is to be effected ; and there is a magician who has 
 
I So THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 accomplished it — the Prussian municipal law, and King Frederick 
 William III. of Prussia." ^ 
 
 De Beaumont, while pronouncing von Raumer's proposal — 
 apparently under a misconception of von Raumer's meaning — 
 " purely revolutionary, proper to engender the most dangerous 
 covetings and the most fatal passions,"" was equally emphatic 
 for peasant proprietorship, and for radical reform. Specifying 
 first the desirable remedies of new industry, emigration, and poor 
 relief, he prescribed the "abolition of the civil, political and 
 religious privileges of the aristocracy," to be accomplished in 
 abolishing the feudal system of tenures in Ireland (i) by way 
 of prohibiting sub-tenancies and (2) by abolishing the right 
 of primogeniture; and further (3) the disestablishment of the 
 State Church, and (4) the payment of stipends to the Catholic 
 clergy. 
 
 The second and third of von Raumer's proposals were realised 
 in that generation ; but it was thirty years before the third of 
 de Beaumont's was given effect to, and some years more before 
 even a beginning was made in the direction of von Raumer's 
 fifth; while his first, which concurs with de Beaumont's last, 
 is still not even within sight of being adopted. And meantime 
 the problem itself has developed. Had a system of peasant pro- 
 prietary been established by the middle of the century, it would 
 undoubtedly have worked great things for Ireland. Had it been 
 established simultaneously with the reforms in Prussia, it might 
 even have limited in some measure the fatality of the famine of 
 1848, for it would probably have had a restraining effect on 
 population, or at least upon sub-division of holdings. Had it 
 been established before i860, it would have prevented the Fenian 
 movement ; and it would have fitted the peasantry to meet the 
 bad years after 1870 much better than did Mr Gladstone's 
 Act of that year. But with no further land reforms than the 
 Land Acts of 1870 and 1889, the merely modified situation 
 of the Irish peasantry left them unable to meet another series 
 of bad seasons, and the old story of evictions and emigration 
 is told afresh year by year. Thus it comes about that the 
 English Government figures to the eyes of Europe very much 
 as of old, the record of evictions and of emigration being 
 for foreigners the most easily noted phase of the history of 
 things Irish. The attempts of the Liberal party to undo the 
 wrongs of the past seem trivial beside the amount of misery that 
 
 ' Etiglaud i)i 1835, Eng. tr., iii. 198. 
 
 "^ V Irlande, sociale politique et nUigieiise, 7^ edit., I. Ixxxiii. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 15 H 
 
 subsists ; and the foreigner shrugs his shoulders as of old over 
 English misgovernment. This is the effect conveyed even by the 
 careful work of M. Fournier, Professor in the Faculty of Law 
 at Grenoble, who was sent to Ireland in 1 880-81 by the French 
 Ministry of Public Instruction, on the proposal of the Paris 
 Faculty of Law, to report on the agrarian question. It may be 
 said of the work of M. Fournier that while he has done the 
 historical and technical part of his work with much industry and 
 substantial success, he has failed to realise that the Irish agrarian 
 problem is a changing one, and has consequently erred in attri- 
 buting all the existing trouble directly to the wrong-doing of past 
 time. It is quite true that but for that wrong-doing the Irish 
 people would be much more able to meet new difficulties ; but 
 M. Fournier does not seem to recognise that new difficulties 
 develop, setting all down to the legacy of the ages. 
 
 " Parliament has bettered the situation of the rural classes," he 
 writes ; " it was out of its power to clear away the prejudices, the 
 rancours, the hatreds which the past has bequeathed to the present, 
 and which, exploited by agitators, magnified by the popular imagina- 
 tion, will retard for yet a long time the re-establishment of public peace 
 in Ireland. The legislator may well seek to organise for the future a 
 more equitable rule : there is no magic ring by which he can make 
 tabula rasa of the past. History does not recommence : we may 
 truly say with the Roman juriconsults that no written law can efface 
 things done : Facti causae infcctac tiulla const itiitione fieri possuni.'' * 
 
 Here, doubtless, there is a touch of national prejudice ; for 
 on such a view all history, French no less than English, would 
 be but a record of inherited curses. That is not the final lesson 
 to be learned. But it is important to realise how, the old mis- 
 deeds of England being thus represented as the actual causes of 
 all present troubles, and the misdeeds themselves being freshly 
 set forth with abundant learning, European public opinion regards 
 the refusal of the English majority to let the Irish people grapple 
 with their own problem. It is not too much to say that the 
 retention of our grip over Ireland, with its eternal sequence of 
 penury and hate, causes every display of English sympathy for 
 oppressed aliens to figure in European eyes as a grotesque 
 hypocrisy. When English meetings protest against the mis^ 
 handling of Armenians by Turks, French and Germans ask 
 whether the difference between direct massacre and the chronic 
 *' sentence of death" by eviction in Ireland justifies the English 
 
 ' La Qntstioit Agraire en Irlandc, 1S82, pn'face. 
 
Ib2 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 attitude of disinterested philanthropy. They will not stop to 
 ask whether the sympathisers with the Armenians do not also 
 sympathise with homeless Irish ; though indeed if they did 
 they would find leading Unionists taking up the cause of the 
 Armenians. It suffices that it is " England " that employs the 
 ■ crowbar brigade in Catholic Ireland and denounces the rule of 
 the Turk over Eastern Christians. 
 
 On the question of the Irish demand for autonomy, finally, we 
 have the work of M. Francis de Pressense, — the son of the well- 
 known French Protestant scholar, a trained diplomatist with an 
 English experience, editor of one of the weightiest Parisian 
 journals — declaring decisively for Home Rule. 
 
 " This book," he says of his treatise, " is an essay in political history. 
 I have sought in the past the causes of the apparently irremediable 
 division which arms against each other the two parts of the British 
 empire. / undertook this study ivith a prejudice favourable to the 
 English supremacy and an tcnfavourablc prepossession towards Irish 
 autonomy : I conclude it, fully possessed by the priticiple of limited 
 independence or of ' Home Rule,' as it has been defned by Mr Gladstone 
 and accepted by Mr Parnell.'" ^ 
 
 It may be answered that there is an old tendency in France to 
 take the Irish side ; indeed M. de Pressense admits as much, but 
 it is without weakening his case : 
 
 " Ireland is tied to us by bonds of race, by common memories, by 
 shared sympathies. And I may avow without circumlocution that I 
 have been glad to establish the accordance of the result of impartial 
 research with the instinct of French hearts. This book has been con- 
 ceived and written in an entirely historic spirit. None the less I trust 
 that it may present, in a fashion not too unworthy of the cause, the 
 just claims of Ireland. The whole past of that country, especially 
 since the iniquitous suppression of its independence, seems to me to 
 testify in its favour. There are, if I do not deceive myself, reasons 
 for believing that this great suit, already gained before the tribunal of 
 histor)', is on the eve of being gained also before the tribunal of 
 British democracy." 
 
 Nor is this tone special to France. The Prussian von 
 Raumer, a specialist in history, who prescribed peasant proprie- 
 tary for Ireland sixty years ago, and who had a distinct touch of 
 Prussian ill-will to France, exhibited no Teutonic disesteem for 
 the Irish people. His verdict was that 
 
 ' L' Irlande ei F Angleterrc depuis I'acle d'miioti jiisqu'd nos jours, 18S9, 
 preface. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 83 
 
 " Ireland is the most deplorable instance in modern history that a 
 great and noble people may for centuries together be involved in the 
 same injustice and infatuation, and all the highly-praised forms of the 
 constitution be after paralysed by the forces of passion and prejudice. 
 Kings, lords, and commons have alternately and simultaneously 
 wronged Ireland ; how should humanity, mildness, and obedience to 
 the laws proceed from such education ? What all the forms of the 
 constitution denied, what even now the boldest minds in England 
 conceive to be impossible, our kings have accomplished, for schools, 
 churches, cities, towns, peasants, landed property, trade, tolls, mihtary 
 institutions, &c., and laid the basis of a freedom of which Ireland, if 
 no quicker progress is made, will be destitute for centuries to come."' ' 
 
 " There is no essential difference between the English a?id Irish in 
 regard to their intellectual qualities; and the defects which appear 
 occasionally will be most easily remedied, and even wholly removed, 
 by employment, education, mutual influence, and equal treatment." - 
 
 And one of the best of recent histories of Ireland, that by Dr 
 Hassencamp, head master of the royal gymnasium of Ostrowo, 
 gives another weighty German summing up against England's 
 treatment of Ireland. It is after pronouncing in favour of the 
 Union that, noting the breach of faith which followed it, in the 
 withholding of Catholic emancipation, the historian writes : — 
 
 "Thus England at that period played the part of the legendary 
 Roman king, who at first refused to purchase the sacred books for a 
 small price, but who was afterwards compelled to offer a much higher 
 sum for only a portion of them. In like manner England might in the 
 year 1800 have procured peace and tranquillity for Ireland by the 
 comparatively inconsiderable concession of Catholic emancipation ; 
 but the favourable opportunity was allowed to pass away ; and now 
 all concessions and all offers appear to be insufficient to purchase that 
 priceless blessing." "' 
 
 This may be taken as the prevailing attitude of continental 
 opinion at any time for sixty years back. 
 
 As for opinion in America, despite the frequent outcrop in the 
 States of a spirit of native dislike to the immigrant Irish, who 
 unhappily but naturally figure pretty largely in the corrupt politics 
 of their new environment, — or perhaps just because of resentment 
 of this complication of American problems — there is an over- 
 whelming agreement as to the perversity of the refusal of Home 
 
 ^ England in 1835, as cited, iii. 201. 
 - England in 1841, by the same. Eng. tr., i. 182. 
 
 ^ The History of Ireland from the Kefonnation to the Union, by Dr R. 
 Hassencamp. Eng. tr. , 1888, end. 
 
184 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Rule by the English majority. The only serious American 
 objection to Home Rule, I believe, is that of my esteemed 
 ^^y friend Mr Moncure Conway, who, seeing how the element of 
 State rights in the American constitution was so long the 
 support of slavery, and was finally the source of the Civil 
 War — a fact too little appreciated by writers on the constitution, 
 here and in the States — insists on the dangers that might arise 
 under a similar constitution for Ireland. The infamous negro- 
 lynchings in the Southern States in our own day Mr Conway 
 traces to the same cause, the judicial authority of the Central 
 Executive being powerless against the hatreds of race. But that 
 is, I think, not at bottom an argument against Home Rule, but 
 simply a consideration proving the need for care in forming the 
 British Federal Constitution of the future. It would be a simple 
 matter to make provision for the prompt repression by the Cen- 
 tral executive of all transgressions on the part of the people of 
 any component section of a federal State against any of the others; 
 indeed such a State as ours would not be, at all likely to leave that 
 matter so ill arranged as it is in the constitution of the Republic. 
 In any case, a question about form of constitution is one 
 thing and a question about the success or failure of a paramount 
 State in governing a dependency is another ; and in this respect 
 there is only one voice throughout the non-English world as to 
 the Anglo-Irish relation. Indeed it must needs be so. It must 
 be obvious to any Englishmen capable of intelligently putting to 
 himself the question, that if Ireland had attained her present 
 state under the auspices of any other nation, the voice of Eng- 
 land w^ould unanimously declare that nation unfit to exercise its 
 power. When misery and revolt are reported in Christian popu- 
 lations under the rule of the Turk, the average Englishman 
 never dreams of suggesting mere perversity among the revolters : 
 he at once ascribes the trouble to the misgovernment of the 
 Porte. And if any other territory of northern Europe were seen to 
 be capable of successful tillage, but forever a prey to destitution, 
 he would take for granted not the incapacity of the inhabitants 
 but some insanity in the laws with which they were always at 
 strife. What the Englishman would thus do in any case similar 
 to that of Ireland, foreigners do in the Irish case. Educated 
 men in Europe are not to be persuaded that an intelligent people 
 living on a fruitful soil remains in desperate poverty and burning 
 disaffection age after age by reason purely of its own perversity. 
 They are not be talked by unreasoning British Protestants into 
 the belief that mere " Catholicism" is the cause of the misery of the 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 85 
 
 Irish peasantry, when CathoHcism goes with fair comfort in France 
 and Germany. They say with absolute confidence that the Irish 
 results are results of misrule. They point to the vast change 
 made in the condition of the peasantry of France, once so 
 wretched, now on the whole so progressive, by the French 
 Revolution. They point to the no less notable change made in 
 the life of the peasantry of Prussia by land legislation at the 
 beginning of the century — a change which went for much in 
 enabling Prussia in a few years to rise from political ruin to 
 energetic success. They say that Irish peasants are amenable to 
 change of conditions like any other, and that the Englishman 
 who denies it is a sample of the perversity which he imputes. 
 
 If argument and pressure of opinion throughout the civilised 
 world could carry the point, Ireland would have had autonomy 
 long ere this. Unfortunately, as Unionist comments on foreign 
 opinion show, the majority of Englishmen pay too little heed to such 
 opinion to be soon led by it to any course save one of mere defiance. 
 There is, however, a consideration which may appeal to them 
 in the matter, and that is, that should England ever be really em- 
 broiled in a war through some such complication as those which so 
 rapidly accumulated on our hands a little while ago, the element 
 of Irish hostility to England throughout the English-speaking 
 world might be a very serious matter. AVhen President Cleveland 
 received thousands of telegrams congratulating him on his unhappy 
 outbreak of bluster in the Venezuela dispute, we could be sure that 
 most of them would come from American Irishmen. To English- 
 men of the militarist school, who form the bulk of the Unionist 
 party, and who confessedly cannot feel safe unless their navy be twice 
 as strong as any two (or is it now three ?) others, it can hardly be 
 a comfortable reflection that their policy thus multiplies an eager 
 enmity to them in one of the largest populations of the civilised 
 world. 
 
 And it is not merely in foreign States that this enmity subsists. 
 There is a chronic talk of Imperial Federation — a Federation 
 between the mother country (a group of provinces not federated) 
 and the colonies. But the colonies contain hundreds of 
 thousands of Irishmen ; and who shall say how many of them 
 have been made determined haters of England by their experience 
 of her rule ? Why should they consent to federate with the so- 
 called mother country, the unseemly group in which /-^^/r mother 
 land is chained to the wheels of the others, and insolently denied 
 the right which the colonies are encouraged to claim ? We have 
 seen that the Irish immigrant element in the North American 
 
1 86 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 colonies counted for much in their revolt against England. Who 
 shall say that the larger and perhaps more embittered Irish 
 element in the Australasian colonies, already greater by far than 
 were the North American at the date of their independence, may 
 not in our own time work the utter alienation of these ? Surely 
 the English majority would do well to make the Irish race a 
 friend before it grows too dangerous an enemy. There is a 
 possible Nemesis growing out of all the generations of Irish 
 misery, out of the evictions, out of the over-population, out of 
 the endless emigration. The Irish race, the breed with Irish 
 memories, multiplies ; and the so-called Anglo-Saxon race, 
 outside of England, nay, even in England, is becoming more 
 and more a race with Irish names, looking askance on the 
 English race though speaking the English tongue. " Ten years 
 ago," said an English politician twenty-eight years ago, 
 
 "Ten years ago the third and fourth cities of the world, New York 
 and Philadelphia, were as English as our London ; the one is Irish 
 now, the other all but German. Not that the Quaker city will remain 
 Teutonic ; the Germans too are going out upon the land ; the Irish 
 alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be 
 Celtic, while the country continues English ; a fierce and easily-roused 
 people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the 
 land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are of small 
 moment by the side of the one great question. Who are the Americans 
 to be ? " ' 
 
 These are the words of a Home Ruler, albeit one with anti- 
 Celtic notions. But it was a Unionist, it was Mr Bright, who in 
 his pre-Unionist days said this : — 
 
 "In America you have another Ireland, an Ireland which does not 
 fear the government in Ireland, an Ireland full of passion with regard 
 to what they believe to be the sufferings of the country they have left. 
 ... If the government of England and the government of the United 
 Kingdom, as it is called, had been a government of statesmen, does 
 any man in the world believe they would have allowed things to come 
 to such a pass as this .''... See what a position we are in. The whole 
 civilised world points to our condition. The newspapers of France, 
 of Germany, and even of Italy, and the newspapers of the United 
 States ... do not now write about Poland, or Hungary, or Venice, but 
 they write about Ireland. . . . And if it were not a delicate subject to. 
 treat upon, which I now think it better to avoid, it would be easy to 
 show how greatly we have lost in national power and moral influence 
 
 ^ Sir Charles Dilke, Greater Britain, 4th ed., p. 11. 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 1 8/ 
 
 with other nations, and especially with regard to our fears of defence. 
 ... If it were not for the moral sense of the people of the United 
 States, and the good faith and honour of their government, there is no 
 doubt but the great trouble — far greater than any we have yet seen — 
 would have arisen on the Canadian frontier between the Irishmen in 
 the United States and the subjects of the British Crown in Canada." ^ 
 
 To such testimonies as these, many Englishmen, themselves 
 foolhardy to the point of bluster, return the answer that it is only 
 the ignorant and noisy part of the Irish- American population that 
 causes the American feeling to seem so largely anti-British. The 
 charge of wrongdoing against themselves they meet by charging 
 rowdyism and folly on the Irish-American population in the mass. 
 Such charges dispose of themselves, on the old principle that he 
 who indicts a whole nation does but indict himself. The Irish 
 have their full share of blatancy, as have the Germans, the 
 French, the English, and every other people in the world. But 
 it is only the most blatant of Englishmen who can suppose that 
 in the exiled Irish world there are not multitudes of men who 
 judge the weaknesses of their fellows as sharply as do English 
 anti-democrats the weaknesses of theirs, and who yet bear an 
 enduring ill-will to England. " I have met," wrote an honest 
 though effusive Irish observer during the Fenian period, 
 
 " I have met in many parts of the Union grave, quiet men-of-business 
 Irishmen who, though holding their opinions with the resolute firmness 
 common to their temperament and tone of thought, rarely take part in 
 public matters, and yet are interested in what is passing around them, 
 especially in whatever concerns the honour of their race and country. 
 Froin men of this class I heard the viost strongly expressed opposition 
 to the Fenian inovement, and occasionally the bitterest contempt of its 
 leaders. Jealous of the reputation of their countrymen and . . . 
 sensitive to ridicule, they were ashamed of the miserable squabbles 
 and dissensions so common among the various branches or sections 
 into which the Irish organisation is, or was then, divided ; and they 
 experienced the keenest humiliation as some new disaster rendered 
 the previous boasting more glaring, or more painfully absurd. Yet 
 among these grave, quiet men of business, these men of model lives, 
 these men in whose personal integrity any bank in the country would 
 place unlimited trust — amongst these men England has enemies, not 
 friends. They are opposed to Fenianism not because it menaces 
 England but because it compromises Ireland. So much alike do 
 
 ^ Speech of 23rd December, 1867, cited by Mr Fox, Key to the Irish 
 Question, p. 323. 
 
1 88 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 these men think and express themselves, though perhaps a thousand 
 miles apart, that one would be inclined to suppose them in constant 
 communication and intercourse with each other. Not to say in 
 substance, but almost literally, this is the manner in which I have 
 heard a number of these grave, quiet, steady business men refer to the 
 Fenian movement : — ' I strongly object to this Fenian organisation, for 
 many reasons. In the first place, it keeps up a distinct nationality 
 in the midst of the American population, and it is our interest to be 
 merged in this nation as quickly as may be. In the second place, 
 I have no confidence in the men at its head : how can I ? Which 
 of them am I to believe? If I believe one, I can't the other. 
 Then what they propose is absurd. They talk nonsense about going 
 to war with England, and England at peace with the world ; and 
 every additional disaster only rivets Ireland's chains more strongly. 
 If indeed this country were at war with England, that would be quite 
 another thing ; and after all, of what good would that be for Ireland? 
 Would it better her condition ? Would it be worth the risk ? . . . 
 But at the same time, I must say this for myself, if I could see my 
 way clearly, if I thought that a fair chance offered of serving Ireland 
 and making her happy, I would willingly sacrifice half of what I have 
 in the world in the attempt.' . . ." ^ 
 
 If the English Unionist journals, in their way of imbecile self- 
 glorification, make light of the enduring ill-will of such men as 
 these, at least the mass of the English people is sane enough to 
 feel that the policy is wrong which provokes it. And as the 
 unconditional refusal of Home Rule to the orderly and constitu- 
 tional demand of the great Irish majority, won to goodwill by 
 the effort to meet them, has justified tenfold the resentment of 
 the best and sanest of the Irish race against the apparent English 
 majority, it is not to be believed that that majority can much 
 longer remain Unionist, even in appearance. The faults and 
 disasters which weaken the Irish parliamentary party cannot alter, 
 for alien and impartial eyes, the merits of the issue. The orbis 
 terrarum will not alter its estimate of the Anglo-Irish relation 
 because Parnell, chancing to clash with the ethical superstitions 
 of English Protestants and Irish Catholics alike, lost first his hold, 
 and then his judgment, and then his life ; or because the scratch 
 regiment which he despotically ruled has broken up as did Crom- 
 well's host in vain dissension. That Parnell at his best was an 
 I imperfect man, or that his followers are imperfect in weaker 
 ways, is, I repeat, a childishly irrelevant comment on the Irish 
 problem, coming as it does from men who are only imperfect 
 
 ^ J. F. Alaguirc, M.P., The Irish in America, 1868, pp. 607-609. - 
 
THE LESSON OF IRISH HISTORY. 189 
 
 with a difference, and that a difference for the worse, seeing that 
 their aim is wholly negative and repressive, and in nowise con- 
 structive. 
 
 Either the lately awakened forces of political intelligence and 
 social aspiration are doomed to end in all-round frustration, or 
 the cause of the Irish people, as against English enmity, is 
 destined to be gained. Either the English nation is to sink 
 ever deeper in social corruption and political torpor, growing 
 more and more a populace of gross toils and gross joys, 
 passing further and further from the very dream of equality 
 and of elevation of life, or the fabric of the State is to be new 
 made and its life blood purified by the righting of the ancient 
 wrong which so fatally flaws both. By the beginning of the 
 twentieth century we ought to have some clear notion of how 
 the tide of things is turning. 
 
 -i- 
 
III. 
 
 MOMMSEN AND RICHEY ON GAULS AND IRISH. 
 
 The typical voice in the propaganda of Teuton against Celt 
 is that of Theodor Mommsen, the German archaeologist and 
 historian of Rome. He is a very learned man in his special 
 walk; and there has been a natural tendency to assume that a 
 scholar who has all Latin archaeology at his fingers' ends must 
 be a first-rate historian, not only in the sense of knowing and 
 telling all the facts, but as a judge of men and events, and a 
 commentator on the course of things. Certainly he ranks highest 
 among the modern historians of Rome, there being no such 
 competition for the front rank there as is seen in the historio- 
 graphy of Greece, in which Englishmen, Germans, and French- 
 men have vied with each other throughout the century, proceed- 
 ing one weighty history after another with zealous industry. In 
 Roman history, though he is already felt by students to belong 
 to a past generation, he may still be said to have it all his own 
 way. I have indeed heard portions of his work discussed among 
 specialists with scant respect, some describing portions of it as 
 simply stupid, the work of a scholar who had the ambition to 
 make a name as a writer, though lacking some of the qualities of 
 mind most essential to the historian's task. And of some of the 
 parts of his work which I have seen specialists praise, I am pre- 
 pared to afiirm the superficiality. But our business here is to 
 consider in particular the character and weight of the verdict he 
 has volunteered on what he regards as the " Celtic " race. 
 
 It is after telling the story of the conquest of Gaul by Caesar 
 that he thinks fit to bestow on his readers his Germanic opinion 
 of not only the Gauls of antiquity but the modern Irish, whose 
 " kinship " with the former he takes for granted, without a 
 moment's scholarly reflection on the ethnological questions in- 
 volved. Here is the passage, a little condensed : — 
 
 "This was no accidental destruction, such as destiny sometimes pre- 
 
 190 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEY ON GAULS AND IRISH. I9I 
 
 pares even for peoples capable of development, but a self-incurred 
 and in some measure historically necessary catastrophe. ... In the 
 mighty vortex of the world's history, which inexorably crushes all 
 peoples that are not as hard and as flexible as steel, such a nation 
 could not permanently maintain itself: with reason the Celts of the 
 continent suffered the same fate at the hands of the Romans, as their 
 kinsmen in Ireland suffer down to our own day at the hands of the 
 Saxons — the fate of becoming merged as a leaven of future develop- 
 ment in a politically superior nationality. ... In the accounts of the 
 ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and Seine we find almost every 
 one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognise 
 as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears : the laziness in the 
 culture of the fields ; the delight in tippling and brawling ; the ostenta- 
 tion . . . ; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles, of allu- 
 sions and quaint turns ; the droll humour . . . ; the curiosity . . . ; 
 and the extravagant credulity . . . ; the childlike piety, which sees 
 in the priest a father . . . ; the unsurpassed fervour of national 
 feeling . . . ; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance- 
 leader . . . but at the same time the utter incapacity ... to attain 
 or even barely to tolerate any organisation, any sort of fixed mili- 
 tary or political discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and all 
 places, the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisi- 
 tive, credulous, amiable, clever, but — in a political point of view — 
 thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always 
 and everywhere the same." ^ 
 
 Let us first take the series of propositions on its merits, as a 
 pretended differentiation of the Celtic race from others, before 
 considering the value of the identification of ancient Gauls with 
 modern Irish. 
 
 1. Laziness hi agriculture. As a special description of the 
 Gauls of antiquity, this, as every student knows, is untrue. 
 The Gauls were indeed behind the Romans in agriculture, 
 but they were ahead of the Germani. Slothfulness in agricul- 
 ture is one of the characteristics specially given to the Germani 
 by Tacitus.- 
 
 2. Delight in tippling and brawling. This too is one of the 
 features noted in ancient German life by all observers. It is no 
 less noted in mediaeval German life. Some say it is sufficiently 
 notable in the German life of to-day, to say nothing of the 
 English. 
 
 ' Mommsen, History of Rome, B. v., ch. 7, Eng. tr. , ed. 1894, vol. v., pp. 
 98-100. 
 
 - De moribus Germanorum, cc. 26, 45. 
 
192 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 3. Ostentation. A feature of the life of a score of peoples in 
 the same culture stage ; and one abundantly seen in the history 
 of the German aristocracy, who answer to the upper-class Gauls 
 of whom Csesar wrote. 
 
 4. Figurative language. The special characteristic of the 
 Teutonic Eddas and Sagas. 
 
 5. Droll humour. Without definitely answering in the affirma- 
 tive the old question of Bouhours, " Whether a German can have 
 wit," we may impartially note that Germans in modern times 
 have made rather more pretensions to "droll humour" than 
 any other European nation ; and that such mediaeval works as 
 Till Eulenspiegel, Reynard the Fox, (albeit borrowed from the 
 French), and the productions of Hans Sachs, and such works 
 as some of Richter's in modern times, give some basis for the 
 claim. It is not to be denied that a modern collection of 
 German jokes, as Mr Lowell put it, makes life seem more 
 serious, and has a tendency to make it more precarious ; but 
 still the habit of joking seems as common in Germany as any- 
 where else. 
 
 6. Curiosity. As against the special testimony of Caesar 
 regarding the Gauls I do not recall any concerning the ancient 
 Germani. But every student knows that an eager interest in the 
 advent of any stranger with news is one of the commonest as it 
 is one of the most natural features of the life shown in Anglo- 
 Saxon literature. And I may add my personal testimony — 
 which can be borne out by that of many others — that when 
 travelling in Germany I have been questioned by chance fellow- 
 passengers with a zest of primitive inquisitiveness which I have 
 never seen equalled in any " Celtic " country. 
 
 7. Extravagant Credulity. If Herr Mommsen refers to 
 superstition, he may be accommodated with many proofs that 
 in Germany in all ages, down to that in which a German 
 journalist is imprisoned for jesting at the Holy Coat of Treves, 
 there has been as much religious credulity as anywhere else. 
 Buckle and others in his day held the German people to be 
 more superstitious than either the French or the English. In 
 regard to other sorts of credulity, the land of Baron Munchausen 
 surely ought not to waive its just claims. 
 
 8. Childlike Piety. Wherein Celtic piety is more childlike 
 than any other at the same culture stage, it is impossible to 
 discover without some assistance from the historian's suppressed 
 knowledge. 
 
 9. Subservience to the priest. No Catholic people was ever 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEV ON GAULS AND IRISH. 1 93 
 
 more subservient to its priesthood than the " Teutonic " Lowland 
 Scotch have been since the Reformation. The fihal attitude 
 towards the priest is visibly common to the Italian, the Spanish, 
 and the Russian peoples ; and in no Catholic country is 
 Catholicism more effectively organised than in Catholic Germany 
 and Austria. 
 
 10. Fervour of National feeling. Obviously a ([uality of non- 
 Celtic stocks in at least as high a degree. 
 
 11. Inclination to revolt »?ider any chance leader. Does this 
 mean that Vercingetorix was a " chance leader " ? Was he any 
 more so than Arminius ? And under how many " chance 
 leaders " have the Irish people revolted ? Is the expression 
 any more than a piece of chance verbiage ? 
 
 12. Licapacity to attain any organization or fixed discipline. 
 Exactly the account given by Tacitus of the Germani, who 
 never did "attain any sort of fixed military or political dis- 
 cipline" till modern times, and who remained for centuries 
 disorganised while France was highly organised. If France is 
 to reckon as a Celtic country, Dr Mommsen's proposition is 
 a farce. 
 
 13. Apply the closing sentence, finally, to the divided Germany 
 of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, down 
 to the era of Bismarck, and compare the effect. This was a 
 Germany which could not unite on any ground between 1790 
 and 1866, could not effectively resist Louis XIV. without the 
 help of England, could not unite against the first Napoleon, 
 could not unite at all save in resistance to the foolish attack 
 of Napoleon III. All the epithets of Dr Mommsen could 
 plausibly have been applied, and were applied, to Germans, often 
 by Germans themselves, with the exception of the last, which is 
 a kind of blatant aspersion that no judicious writer would cast 
 on any nation in any stage, — not to Spain or Turkey in their 
 lowest hours. 
 
 So much for the items of the differentiation. Every one turns 
 out to be worse than worthless as a distinguishing mark of the 
 race aspersed. The passage is a string of journalistic phrases, 
 strung together with as little science and as little sincerity as go 
 to the work of any Chauvinist leader-writer in Berlin. What 
 then is to be said of the bearing of the whole passage on the 
 case of Ireland, and what of the political sanity of the doctrine 
 laid down ? What is the scientific content of the formula 
 on " historically necessary catastrophes " ? Does it amount to 
 anything more than the empty deliverance that when a nation 
 
 N 
 
194 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 is beaten it is beaten ? If anything else, it is as good for one 
 case as for another ; and we are led to the instructive conclu- 
 sions that the assassination of Caesar himself, the fall of the 
 Roman Empire, the later rotting-down of Teutondom in Italy, 
 the conquest of Anglo-Saxondom by Danes and by Normans, 
 and of Teutondom in Spain by Saracens, the fall of Germany 
 into anarchy after the Reformation, the agony of the Thirty 
 Years' War, the age of impotence which followed, and the 
 beating down of the insolence of Prussia into the dust by 
 Napoleon at Jena, " were all in some measure historically 
 necessary catastrophes." So with the fustian about the vortex 
 which crushes all people not as hard and as flexible as steel. 
 Since Spain and Italy and Turkey and Morocco and China and 
 Persia have all continued to subsist as nations, century after 
 century, despite periods of impotence and stagnation, they are 
 all, on Dr Mommsen's principles, as hard and as flexible as steel 
 in comparison with the Gauls, who were " necessarily " conquered 
 by Caesar, and in comparison with the Germans, whom Cssar 
 did not attempt to overrun, though whenever he met an army of 
 them he annihilated it in an hour, as Marius did the Cimbri and 
 Teutones. Dr Mommsen, in fine, is childish enough to assume 
 that the Gaulish people was "destroyed" because it was definitely 
 absorbed in the Roman civilisation, and that the Irish people is 
 destroyed because it still remains at the mercy of English mis- 
 government. On the same principle, Alsace and Lorraine were 
 destroyed when France annexed them, and were destroyed 
 afresh when Germany got them back. 
 
 When we rationally consider the past history and present 
 position of Ireland, the Teutonic declamation of Dr Mommsen 
 on the subject falls away from our thoughts like the quotidian 
 brawling of the hired newspapers of his Fatherland. The Irish 
 land, the Irish people, have stood for seven hundred years at a 
 relative disadvantage such as the so-called Germanic peoples 
 never underwent — a disadvantage long ago fully recognised by 
 intelligent writers of his own nationality who took the trouble to 
 study the case. If the Irish people in modern times have ever 
 on a large scale been indolent, it was visibly because the fruits 
 of their industry were systematically wrested from them under 
 the worst land laws in Europe. That they are signally in- 
 dustrious, whether at home or abroad, under fair conditions, is 
 admitted even by enemies, the fact having been established by 
 the testimony of a series of observers who had in this matter the 
 decisive advantage over Dr Mommsen of knowing that whereof 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEY ON GAULS AND IRISH. 195 
 
 they speak. And since he penned his paragraph, the Irish 
 people has shown that it can organise for poHtical purposes so 
 efficiently as to paralyse the English Parliament and force the 
 two main English parties in turn to come to terms. For the 
 rest, if the Irish Nationalist politicAl organisation disrupted at the 
 fall and death of Parnell, it did no more than the German 
 Socialist organisation did at the death of Lassalle, — and may do 
 again. 
 
 One makes these comparisons specially between Celtica and 
 Germany because it is so plain that Dr Mommsen's handling of 
 the character of the Celtic race is an expression of mere vulgar 
 racial vanity on his part. He has not made the most ordinary 
 study of the ethnological problem : he does not seem to be 
 aware that one exists. He speaks of the Irish as the Celtic 
 kindred of the Gauls in apparently complete ignorance of the 
 presumption thnt the blood of the Irish people was largely 
 "Teutonic" in the period before trustworthy history begins, and 
 of the fact that it was certainly much mixed with Scandinavian 
 and English elements in the historic period. In the same way 
 he takes as unquestioned an absolute racial distinction between 
 Caesar's Gauls and Germani, when many writers of his own 
 nation have maintained that the Gauls were Germanic. Dr 
 Mommsen was not analysing a scientific problem. He was 
 delivering himself of catchpenny patriotic rhetoric in the name 
 of historical science. 
 
 And this fact itself, which must be perfectly well recognised 
 by many sensible students in Germany, is instructive to those 
 who really study the conditions under which nations advance 
 and retrogress in true civilisation. From the critical sagacity of 
 Von Raumer before 1850 to the uncritical Chauvinism of 
 Mommsen after 1850, the process is not one of advance in 
 political wisdom. And it may not be out of place to say here 
 that the mere pre-eminent documentary specialism which is the 
 main product of the German scheme of culture is a different 
 thing from eminence in judgment on any subject whatever. Dr 
 Mommsen is a prominent illustration of the success with which 
 men may accumulate historical information without reaching 
 historical understanding ; but it is not in his sphere alone that 
 Ciermany presents the spectacle of knowledge without insight, 
 and of oracular emphasis without wisdom. Into the writing of 
 a multitude of his zealous fellow-scholars of all departments there 
 enters the same egoism, the same disregard of critical scruple, 
 the same headlong affirmation of presuppositions, the same law- 
 
196 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 less wresting of evidence to the support of an obstinately main- 
 tained theory. In philosophy, in mythology, in theology, in 
 Shaksperology, in economics, in history, in aesthetics, the same 
 forms of egoism and industrious incapacity yield cognate results, 
 so that in no country is laborious and learned literature as a rule 
 less durable than in the country which produces most of it. 
 Men like F. C. Baur and K. O. Miiller, men who to knowledge 
 unite the genius for using it, are as rare in Germany, propor- 
 tionally speaking, as anywhere else. And under the regimen of 
 military unity. Chauvinism, and "success," it does not appear 
 that they are relatively multiplying. For the services constantly 
 rendered to the world by mere German industry, every student 
 must be grateful ; but if we discriminate between accumulation 
 of material and advance in philosophic comprehension (as dis- 
 tinguished from arbitrary system-spinning and mere verbal pro- 
 fundity) we shall not find, I think, that the alleged superiority of 
 the Teutonic character is evidenced by the average of results. 
 We find such products of special organisation as special organisa- 
 tion may anywhere yield in a given culture-stage. We find no 
 evidence of a special racial genius, in any sense of the term, save 
 perhaps in so far as the uncured cumbrousness of the German 
 speech seems to impart a cumbrousness to the general run of 
 German utterance. 
 
 That the foregoing remarks on German specialism are not, as 
 some may suspect, mere irrelevant recrimination, will appear 
 when we follow up the analysis of Dr Mommsen's anti-Celtic 
 oracle with an analysis of the very different utterance of the late 
 Professor Richey in reply to it. It was in the first of his Lectures 
 oil Irish History that, after citing Mommsen's deliverance by way 
 of letting ^^w Irish audience hear foreign criticism. Professor 
 Richey met the German's attack with a species of defence which 
 is in large part a surrender. To judge from his critical handling 
 of such fallacies as the view that " the Celt " is innately unfit for 
 seafaring, and the old falsism that Celts are innately prone to 
 dissension, Mr Richey would have seemed to be the last man to 
 admit innate racial defects of any other sort. He was not, I 
 believe, of Irish paternity ; but whatever his own race, he seems 
 in the greater part of his work to stand aloof from all forms of 
 race prejudice. Yet here, where he has to deal explicitly with 
 the doctrine of fixed racial characteristics, he proffers admissions 
 which not only yield to the Celtophobists much of what they assert 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEY ON GAULS AND IRISH, 1 97 
 
 but seem to take the ground from under his own most rational 
 explanations of Irish histor3^ I transcribe the passage : — 
 
 " It may be fairly contended that the failure of the Celtic race is not 
 so much attributable to the inferiority of their organization to other 
 races, as to the fact of their possessing, to a certain degree, a higher 
 organization. ... As contrasted with the Teuton, the Celt possesses a 
 peculiar susceptibility of emotion, and a peculiar rapidity of percep- 
 tion, so much that it may be almost said that an idea has passed away 
 from the mind of a Celt before a Saxon begins to understand it at all. 
 But this has an unfortunate result in practice, because it too often 
 amounts to an incapacity of holding an idea for a long period. . . . The 
 Celt conceives ideas rapidly and clearly, but forgets them as easily. 
 He is brilliant, but not persevering ; his thoughts are vivid but not 
 enduring. This is marked in the whole history of the Gallic race, and 
 particularly in the want of tenacity exhibited by them in their struggles 
 with Rome, and in modern history by the half-Celtic French in many 
 of their wars. ... At the end of the fifteenth century, the French 
 swept all resistance before them in Italy. The Italians dreaded the 
 astonishing furia Francesca; but after a few months every French 
 conquest collapsed, from the want of a steady perseverance. The 
 same characteristics appear in Celtic art and literature. Irish poetry 
 consists of exquisite lyric outbursts ; but, alone of all nations of 
 Europe, the Celts do not possess an epic poem which takes an 
 acknowledged place in universal literature. As to Celtic music, the 
 separate airs handed down from remote antiquity are unequalled in 
 variety, tenderness, and expression ; but Irish mnsic has never risen 
 beyond an air ; operas, oratorios, and concerted pieces have been 
 produced by people of inferior sympathies, but greater industry. . . . 
 The toil of now nigh six centuries expended on Cologne Cathedral 
 testifies the faith and perseverance of the German people. The fierce 
 impulse of Celtic art expended itself in the carving of a doorway, or 
 the illumination of a manuscript. The chief political characteristic of 
 Celtic nations is a want of perseverance in exertion to attain a given 
 •end, and inability permanently to unite for any definite object ; but 
 want of active perseverance must be distinguished from what we may 
 call the passive resistance in old ideas. Though the Celts do not 
 exert a continued effort to accomplish a given object, yet they will 
 -cherish a fixed desire to attain that which they have failed to accom- 
 plish. Ancient traditions and national longings form the staple of 
 their political ideas to such an extent that they do not appreciate 
 existing circumstances, and fail to adapt themselves to an altered state 
 of things." ^ 
 
 ' Kichc-y's Lectures on the History of Iri.'and, 1st Series, 1869, | p. S-II. 
 
IQS the SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Coming from a writer who, though more impartial than any 
 other Irish historian, yet treated Irish concerns with obvious 
 sympathy, this judgment may seem to buttress Mommsen's to 
 such a degree as to overbear all criticism. If authority is to 
 settle the question, it may seem already settled by such a measure 
 of agreement. But the present inquiry has recognised no 
 authority save that of established fact and logical reasoning, and 
 we shall accordingly proceed to analyse Professor Richey's 
 deliverance as we have analysed Professor Mommsen's, taking it 
 first point by point. 
 
 1. Failure. This word is used with a startling laxity. It is 
 applied to the ancient Gauls in respect of their having been con- 
 quered by the Romans, as well as to the Irish in respect of 
 their not having yet secured political equality with the rest of the 
 United Kingdom. But on that line of interpretation nearly every 
 race has "failed." The non-Roman Italians failed to begin with, 
 in that they were conquered by the Romans. The Greeks failed 
 in the same way. The amalgamated Romans in turn, after being 
 successful when largely composed of populations who in the terms 
 of 'the case had failed, failed collectively in that the empire fell 
 before the Germanic barbarians ; who again in turn failed, in that 
 one wave was always overrun by another. The Eastern Teutons 
 later failed when they were subdued by the Westerns under 
 Charlemagne. The German Emperors failed when they lost hold 
 of Italy. The Franks failed in that they lost their language, and 
 were absorbed in the mass of the population they had conquered. 
 'J'he Anglo-Saxons utterly failed in that they were subjugated by 
 the Normans ; and the later English failed grievously in that 
 after having overrun France they were ignominiously driven out. 
 Th^ Jews failed conspicuously. And so on throughout all 
 history. The expression, in fine, is indefensible. 
 
 2. Dijference of Organisation. It has been hereinbefore 
 suggested that some of the presumptive early races may have 
 been overpowered by others who were inferior to them in the 
 sense of being more animal, more brutal, more habitually pug- 
 nacious. But to attribute this or any other delicacy of organisa- 
 tion to the " Celtic " race so-called is quite unwarrantable. They 
 had themselves been concjuerors of other races. The Gauls of 
 Caesar's day, further, really do not seem to have been notable for 
 .superiority of perception. And it will be found that at the close 
 of his allocution Mr Richey absolutely contradicts the dictum 
 with which he sets out. 
 
 3. Discontinuity of Thought. Mr Richey was here, doubtless, 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEV ON GAULS AND IRISH. 1 99 
 
 contrasting the Irish peasant class, as he knew it, with either the 
 EngHsh peasant class or the English educated classes. He seems 
 to have confused vivacity and mobility of temperament with dis- 
 connectedness of thought. The latter defect is common to the 
 majority of mankind, and goes as flfte?i with temperamental sIo7v- 
 fiess as with te)nperame7ital qiiickfiess. It is probably true that the 
 people of Ireland and of France are as a rule more vivacious than 
 the people of England. The cause for such differences is to be 
 looked for in (i) influences of climate and beverages, and {2) 
 influences of political events, including massacres and rebellions, 
 on the nervous system of a race ; such effects being probably 
 heritable, Weismann notwithstanding, But, given the difference 
 in average of temperaments, it does not at all follow that there is 
 a similar difference in continuity of thought or continuity of 
 political action. The Great Rebellion in England and the 
 French Revolution are alike easily to be explained in terms of 
 political causation, without reference to temperaments. And it is 
 simply not true that the " Celtic " nations in the mass show less 
 continuity of feeling and opinion than the others. Professor 
 Richey, as already noted, contradicts himself on this very point. 
 His concluding proposition absolutely destroys that under notice. 
 Both cannot be true. And if we contrast the culture histories of 
 the two races of the definition, we find that neither is true. On 
 the one hand, the " Teutonic " countries which accepted the 
 Reformation proved themselves so far more and not less unstable 
 than those which rejected or suppressed it. The sudden transi- 
 tion from Mary-worship and the reverence for the Mass in 
 England and Germany to ribald rejection of them, proves, if any- 
 thing at all, that the English and Germans were people with little 
 depth or sincerity of religious conviction. No " Celtic " race, 
 again, ever passed from one extreme to another of temper and 
 social habit, and back again, as " Teutonic " England did in 
 passing from the regimen of James I. and Charles I. to that of 
 the Commonwealth, and then again to that of the Restoration. 
 And no Celtic race has ever passed through such a prolonged 
 series of changes of fashions of thought and feeling as have been 
 passed through in (Germany since the rise of Frederick the Great 
 last century. It is specially in "Teutonic " countries, once more, 
 that we meet with the phenomena of religious "revivals," which 
 as such imply a sequel of apathy. The Wesleyan and Salvation 
 Army movements are products of English and not of Irish or 
 French life. And if we contrast the perpetual see-saw of politics 
 in England, the perpetual oscillation between Liberal and Tory 
 
200 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 (Governments, with the steady preponderance of one principle in 
 Irish poHtics, we shall at least find no reason to credit the 
 Teutonic people with more fixity of character than the supposed 
 " Cehic." 
 
 4. Lack of Military Tenacity. This is a strange misreading of 
 history. The Galli made a far more tenacious resistance to Rome 
 than did the Germani. The Germani, in the nature of the case, 
 drew one signal advantage from the rising under Arminius, which 
 was a piece of successful treachery, not a display of " tenacity " 
 at all. But when the Roman conquest was resumed, the Ger- 
 mani showed no such tenacity as did the Galli. When subdued, 
 they were far more passive.^ In fact, it is quite clear that had 
 Germania lain in such a close geographical relation to Rome as 
 did Gallia ; had it been as easily penetrable, and commercially as 
 well worth subduing, it would have been more and not less 
 easily and quickly conquered than Gallia. When Professor 
 Richey proceeds to deal with later Gallic history he becomes 
 astonishingly fallacious. It is an obvious historical fact that the 
 French kingdom was being built up with continuous foresight 
 and patience during centuries in which Germany was a chaos of 
 dissentient States. The case of the conquest of Italy in the 
 fifteenth century is quite misleading when stated as it is by 
 Professor Richey. It was not " lack of perseverance " that made 
 the conquest impermanent, but the nature of the political con- 
 ditions. The French could not stay in Italy ; and they could 
 not govern it from France. The earlier Teutonic conquerors 
 stayed on the soil they conquered ; yet even they were upset 
 by each other in rapid succession ; and they finally could not 
 subdue the Italian cities. On Professor Richey's principles, the 
 English had proved their complete lack of perseverance by their 
 repeated failure to hold their conquests in France and in Scotland, 
 where they were free to keep foot in the country if they could. 
 The proposition really will not stand a moment's criticism. 
 
 5. Art a?td literature. Here one is almost moved to pro- 
 nounce Professor Richey's criticism quite incompetent. To 
 what set of " epics " does he refer ? What is the Danish epic 
 that has taken a place in universal literature ; what the Swedish ; 
 what the Russian ; what the Spanish ; what the Turkish ; what 
 the Hungarian? He was doubtless thinking (i) of the Scandi- 
 navian Sagas and Eddas ; but on the one hand it is now pretty 
 well agreed-on that the Eddas are a product of a Celtic environ- 
 ment and influence; and on the other hand it is surely impos- 
 
 ' See above, p. 81. 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEV ON GAULS AND IRISH. 20I 
 
 sible to pretend that they have a higher place in universal litera- 
 ture than the Arthurian cycle, which is a " Celtic " product. 
 Professor Richey presumably credited to Germany, as an epic of 
 universal acceptance (2) the Nihehingen Lied. But how then 
 could he possibly deny similar status to the Ckansoti de Roland 
 on the side of the " Celts " ? It is idle to reply that the Chanson 
 de Roland shows Germanic influence, for the early German litera- 
 ture was unquestionably inspired by Romance influence. As 
 regards later epics, it seems hardly worth while to continue the 
 discussion. Faust is not an epic ; but if it were it proves nothing, 
 for in Germany as elsewhere the epic is now dead. Don Quixote 
 is not an epic ; but if it were, it would be the last of Spanish 
 production. It is surely time that such matters were looked at 
 in the light of social science rather than of primitive hypotheses 
 about race qualities. The relative development of music is 
 plainly a matter of social conditions. It was most developed 
 where most effort was made to develope it. In Elizabethan Eng- 
 land it stood high. Puritanism threw it out of the line of advance; 
 and with us it is still backward. What Professor Richey said 
 of Irish music was just as true of Scotch music till the other day ; 
 and the beginning of higher music in Scotland is simply a matter 
 of spread of culture-influence from elsewhere. When Ireland 
 achieves a reasonable measure of political peace, and is thus free 
 to develop its culture, it will develop in music as readily as in 
 other matters, if not more so. The " artistic temperament " is at 
 least as common in the Irish people as in others. Mozart and 
 Schubert, " Teutons " both, were certainly not specially " in- 
 dustrious " types, but they framed, the one great operas and the 
 other the torso of a great symphony. Oliver Goldsmith, the 
 ^' Celt," was certainly not a specially industrious type ; but he 
 compiled histories of Greece and Rome, and a bulky work on 
 Natural History, besides producing among his more original 
 works a story, a play, and two poems, which for their day re- 
 presented something like artistic perfection. He had certainly 
 fine sympathies ; but these are no more the appanage of " Celtic " 
 races than the faculty of composition and construction is the 
 appanage of "Teutonic." There is no lack of sympathy behind 
 the Folk Songs of Germany ; and it happens that Gemiith/ichkcit 
 is customarily claimed for themselves by Germans as a prevailing 
 racial characteristic. 
 
 6. Cathedral-building^. It would be hard to find a more per- 
 verse expression of the racial theory than Professor Richey's 
 suggestion that Cologne Cathedral proves the Germans to 
 
202 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 possess a faith and perseverance which the Celts lack. Cologne 
 Cathedral simply represents a series of political conditions, some 
 delaying, some determining the final completion. About fifty 
 years ago, Heine made the very incompletion of the Cathedral 
 a ground for exactly the opposite kind of reflection to Professor 
 Richey's. Such are the harmonies of the a priori method. If 
 Professor Richey had turned his thought to the cathedrals of 
 France in general and of Brittany in particular, he could hardly 
 have penned his preposterous sentence. To take the case of 
 Ireland, never politically united since the Renaissance, and 
 forcibly withheld from cathedral-building with public funds for 
 over three centuries, — to take her case and contrast it with the 
 case of the German people and Cologne Cathedral, is to pass 
 out of sight of sane science, not to say of common-sense. In 
 the United States, all creeds and stocks are alike free to raise 
 cathedrals ; but it is found that the Irish, who mostly went 
 thither in extreme poverty, have built the finest. And some of 
 us could wish that it were not so. The enemy, again, points 
 to the new cathedral as a proof of the power of the Irish priest ; 
 while Cologne Cathedral as we have seen, is to be for even the 
 friendly sentimentalist a proof of the " faith and perseverance of 
 the German people." Thus does the farce of pseudo-science 
 go on. 
 
 7. Impermafieuce and permanence. Here, at the close, Pro- 
 fessor Richey's account of things Celtic collapses in helpless 
 self-contradiction. The Celts are credited with a special want 
 of perseverance to attain a given end, as if they had latterly 
 shown a relatively lower average of political faith than the 
 American Colonies in the War of Independence, the American 
 States in the War of 181 2, the Germans under Napoleon, the 
 Greeks under the Turks, or the Italians under Austria. They 
 are reproached for an " inability permanently to unite for any 
 definite object," as if the English or any other people were ever 
 "permanently united," or as if a "definite object" were a thing 
 for which any people could permanently unite. Then all at once 
 the whole argument is overturned, and we have the lamental)le 
 proposition that " though the Celts do not exert a continued 
 effort to accomplish a given object, yet they will cherish a fixed 
 desire to attain that -ivhich they have failed to accomplish." It 
 seems unnecessary to prove at any length that this is nonsense ; 
 or that the final proposition as to the traditional fixity and un- 
 adaptableness of the Celt is the exact negation of what was 
 previously said as to his changeableness and receptivity. 
 
MOMMSEN AND RICHEV ON GAULS AND IRISH. 203 
 
 I do not think there is much left of Professor Richey's racial 
 disquisition, whether as regards iiis facts or as regards his reason- 
 ings. Sooth to say, it is as poor a performance in the way 
 of sociological reasoning as Mommsen's ; seeing that no more 
 than Mommsen does Professor Richey examine the ethnological 
 question as to the constituents of the so-called Celtic races. 
 He calls the French half-Gallic. On the same principle he 
 should call the Scotch half-Gallic, the English largely Celtic, 
 and the Irish largely Teutonic. But there is neither basis to his 
 doctrine nor coherence in the statement of it. 
 
 If any one still hesitates to dismiss Professor Richey's theory 
 of Celticity, let him at will carry the examination further, to the 
 consideration of further passages in the History — also simple 
 reprints from the original Lectures — in which the same assump- 
 tions are freshly set forth. Let him take, for example, the self- 
 stultifying passage in which the historian makes out in one 
 breath that the Normans in France had altered their character 
 by intermarriage, and in the next breath that after all they kept 
 it substantially unchanged : — 
 
 "By intermarriage with French they [the Normans] had lost the tinge 
 of northern melancholy, the deep sympathy with nature, and that love 
 of their lonely homes which their fathers had entertained. In place 
 thereof they had acquired a light and superficial gaiety, a love of 
 pomp and pleasure, and a true sympathy for art ; they were no longer 
 worshippers of Odin, but among the most zealous patrons of the 
 churches they had wasted. . . . But one quality the Normans in- 
 herited from their ancestors unimpaired — their boundless self-confi- 
 dence and love of adventure." ^ 
 
 We have above seen that the Gallic stock, with which the 
 Normans intermarried, happened to have shown the same 
 qualities of self-confidence and love of adventure ; so that the 
 assumption of heredity in that one case seems rather gratui- 
 tous. On the other hand, if intermarriage is to be held to 
 involve an extensive change of character for the Normans, it 
 must no less involve it for the Germans, the Austrians, the 
 Saxons, and the Irish. Once more the argument is in chaos. 
 
 So, finally, with Professor Richey's comment on " the great 
 German Reformation which Dean Milman truly styles 'the 
 Teutonic development of Christianity ' — an event wholly re- 
 pugnant to the Celtic mind." - . . . I have already shown that 
 
 1 Short History, pp. 1 29- 1 30. - Id., p. 132. 
 
204 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 this line of assertion is utterly inconsistent with the facts.^ The 
 Celts of Scotland have for the most part become fanatical 
 Protestants. The Celts of Wales have done the same. There 
 were no more zealous Protestants in Europe than the Huguenots 
 of France, who were finally driven in great numbers into the 
 " Teutonic " countries. According to one line of ethnological 
 
 V doctrine, Calvin was a Celt. According to another, Luther was 
 a Celt, being brachycephalic. A theory which thus falls into one 
 absurdity of self-contradiction after another may surely be held 
 
 ^ finally to have discredited itself. In Professor Richey's hands it 
 has certainly done so. 
 
 If I am asked how such a criticism is to be reconciled with 
 the judgment that Professor Richey is in other respects an 
 excellent and an impartial historian, I can only answer that he 
 seems to me to represent the effects of the survival of a sub- 
 rational sentiment in a man otherwise rationalistic. He seems 
 indeed to have passed through various stages of thought ; and 
 it is doubtful whether, had he lived to write out his Short History 
 as he had planned, he would have held to what he said in 1869 
 on the subject of race qualities. It is, as I have said, radically 
 I inconsistent with his remarks on the natural for?iiation of race 
 character, in the later lecture which is reprinted as the first 
 chapter of the posthumous work.- Perhaps he had already 
 abandoned the race fallacy all along the line. In any case, his 
 early adhesion to it only shows how much power a widely current 
 
 ^ and time-honoured fallacy may have over even a critical intelli- 
 gence ; and our business is to argue out the issue on its merits. 
 When we find Newton alternating between true physics and 
 mythical history, we do not for a moment accept the latter on 
 the credit of the former. Nay, when we find that even the 
 physics is fallaciously formulated by reason of theological pre- 
 possessions, we recast the formula in terms of accurate philo- 
 sophy. The rational course with Newton, then, is the rational 
 course with lesser men. 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 93-97. - See above, pp. 134-135, iio/c', 161-162, note. 
 
IV. 
 
 HILL BURTON ON THE SCOTTISH CELTS. 
 
 That Hill Burton's History of Scotland takes a high place among 
 complete histories of modern nations, is commonly allowed among 
 the small percentage of his countrymen who have read it, as well 
 as by the larger and perhaps more respectable class who com- 
 promise matters by having it on their shelves. These latter 
 patriots, naturally, are not wont to countenance the suggestion 
 that the work might advantageously have been made a trifle 
 shorter by the relegation of some matter, as for instance the 
 history of the legal and other proceedings against Mary, to 
 separate treatises. It would be an unwarrantable slur on their 
 candour, however, to anticipate from them anything but a fair 
 hearing of a plea for the reversal of one series of Burton's judg- 
 ments, concerning which his readers are probably well nigh 
 unanimous in protest. 
 
 What has mostly struck Scotch and other readers of Burton, 
 certainly, is his impartiality. To the former, accustomed to see 
 sides locally taken with a more than religious fanaticism as to the 
 character of Mary, the Reformation, and the Covenanters, there 
 is something tranquillising and creative of confidence in Burton's 
 dispassionate tone and treatment, which leaves even his militant 
 readers concerned rather to cite him when they can on their own 
 side than to complain of his leniency towards the other. To 
 P^nglishmen, again, his treatment of the ancient quarrel recom- 
 mends itself by the same qualities ; and Dr Freeman, who doubt- 
 less admired such a temper the more because himself devoid of 
 it, was long ago led to praise Burton's unbiassed and scholarly 
 account of the respective doings of Wallace and Edward I. 
 Nothing, indeed, could well be more judicial, more free of 
 rhetoric and nationalist sentiment, than the whole handling of 
 the heroic period in the History, which at this point is peculiarly 
 worthy the quiet study of the author's countrymen. 
 
206 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 But Burton all the while had one prejudice of the most robust 
 and aggressive description ; a prejudice apparently as intimate 
 and as irreversible as any of those which flourish among his 
 compatriots, and as serious as those which he had been able 
 in his own case to set aside — nay, in a sense more so, because 
 there is no prejudice so potent as one which cleaves to a man 
 who is known and knows himself to be on many points excep- 
 tionally unprejudiced. It was not his Pyrrhonism about the 
 Druids and cognate questions — that breaks no bones — but his 
 habitual attitude of tone and temper towards the whole race 
 which, in Scotland and elsewhere, is conventionally called Celtic, 
 with as little notion of the rational significance of the term as 
 can well be in such matters. Burton's use of the name is in 
 itself suspect from the beginning. He early adopts it ^ with no 
 critical investigation of its bearings ; and from that point forward 
 he rarely uses it without direct or indirect racial imputation. A 
 restricted racial theory, in fact, pervades his whole history ; a 
 theory unchecked by logic, untested by data, unexplained by 
 ethnological or biological science. " Through the mists which 
 conceal from us the details of events," he intimates,^ " we can 
 yet see the large fact that the Romanised Britons were a debased 
 and feeble people. Races moulded by the influence of others 
 generally are so." Now, the measure of truth in this generalisa- 
 tion is to all intents and purposes vitiated by the total absence 
 of the comparative element from the estimate. The Britons, 
 obviously, were no more " under the influence of others " than 
 were many other races in the Roman Empire — for instance, the 
 Gauls and the Spaniards, or even the majority of the inhabitants 
 of Italy, not to speak of the Greeks and many of the Germans. 
 That they made brave and resolute soldiers is admitted : they get 
 the credit ^ for the stubbornness of the resistance of the army of 
 Albinus to that of Severus ; and the province " supplied soldiers 
 above the average proportion of its population, if we may judge 
 from the frequency of their use."^ The whole point is that 
 •" there was no military organisation for local self-defence," and 
 that the Britons later succumbed to the Teutons. But this is 
 substantially the history of the whole Western Empire, from 
 north to south ; and the Britons were on all fours with the entire 
 Roman population. It is flatly misleading to name them singly 
 and specially as a "debased and feeble people." They really 
 made a much better resistance to the Saxons than the Saxons 
 
 1 I. 172. " I. 43. ■•'■ I. 40. ^ I. 44. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 207 
 
 did later to the Danes and Normans, or the Teutons in Spain to 
 the Saracens, or the earlier Teutons to the Romans. 
 
 Whether or not Burton viewed the early Britons as Celts, he 
 at least transfers at once to the Celts so-called his low opinion of 
 the former — or rather, he may be surmised to have started with 
 Celtophobia, and decided that the early Britons must have been 
 Celts because they were unfortunate. In his inquiry into the 
 Ossianic poems, considered as a possible clue to the life of the 
 early Scots, properly so called, he notes ^ as a reason for denying 
 the authenticity of the collection, the fact that there "A pure and 
 high spirit of Christian chivalry developed itself in a race yet 
 heathen — a race who, when they afterwards ostensibly belonged 
 to the Christian Church, were so noted for treachery and cruelty 
 that for centuries it was deemed a reproach to any civilised 
 Government to employ them in warfare." We need not here stay 
 to ask what sort of an argument this would be against the 
 Ossianic poems — whether these exhibit a " Christian chivalry," 
 or what that may be ; whether a race might not conceivably 
 degenerate under hard conditions ; or what is proved by the 
 unexplained language as to the employment of the Celts in 
 warfare by "any civilised Government." What is here to be 
 noted is that along with this hostile view of the Celts, Dr Burton 
 started with an equally strong prejudice in favour of the Teutonic 
 or Scandinavian races so-called, having apparently overlooked 
 the opinion, arrived at by Scandinavian ethnologists, that the 
 Teutonic invaders of Scandinavia had absorbed a previous Celtic 
 population. Throughout the Eddas, he early announces,^ " there 
 is ever-striving energy, determination of purpose, the physical 
 power seconding the unbending will, a courage that is manifest 
 not only in contempt of death, but in patient endurance of 
 suffering, a distaste of all politic devices and diplomatic intrigues, 
 and a reliance on honest strength to carry out the mighty designs 
 of a never-resting ambition. There are no applications of gentle- 
 ness and mercy, but there is a strong sense of justice and an 
 aversion to wanton cruelty." The discerning reader of Burton 
 will probably agree that in the strained rhetoric of this passage 
 there is another note than that of the judicial criticism which 
 is his best quality. And as clear as the note of Teutomania here 
 is that of Celtophobia at the same stage ^ : — " It is observable of 
 the Celts, as of other indolent races, that the elements of value 
 to them are not the resources capable of development through 
 industry and enterprise, but those which offer the readiest supply 
 ^ L 175. 2 1 230. =' I, 205. 
 
208 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 of some of the necessaries of life." The Norse pirates are thus 
 credited with a sheaf of virtues, and with an aversion to wanton 
 cruelty, on the strength of vague inference from the Eddas,^ in 
 the face of the abundant historic proofs that they were grossly 
 and wantonly cruel : the Celts are assumed to be indolent, on no 
 proof offered, but apparently because in some countries they 
 have remained poor, just as the industrious Norsemen do to this 
 day in Scandinavia. On such a plan you may prove anything 
 against any race against which you cherish a prejudice, and any- 
 thing in favour of one to which you are attached. If the former 
 are poor and of primitive habits, you convict them of indolence ; 
 while you find the latter, in a similar case, give proof of fortitude 
 and elevation of mind. If the race you dislike is rich and 
 luxurious you dwell on its vices : whereas your favourite people 
 in growing rich only give proof of their power of succeeding. 
 Heads, our side wins ; tails, the other side loses. 
 
 I have said that Dr Burton adopted the name Celt with no 
 adequate investigation of its bearings ; but after beginning to 
 employ it he does recognise, what it is indeed impossible to 
 overlook, that the race so called had become mixed to a high 
 degree early in the dubious historic period. His admissions are 
 remarkable. " We know, historically, that in the west, group 
 after group of Norse invaders were absorbed itito the Irish-speak- 
 ing population. Although the Norsemen were conquerors of the 
 Highland region, and gave its monarchs and lords, the more 
 civilised language [the Celtic] absorbed the ruder though funda- 
 jnentai/y stronger [!], and all spoke the Irish together. Thus, in 
 language, the Teutonic became supreme in the eastern lowlands, 
 the Celtic among the western mountains. From a general view 
 of the whole question, an impression — but nothing stronger than 
 an impression — is conveyed, that the proportion of the Teutonic 
 race that came into the use- of the Gaelic is larger than the propor- 
 tion of the Celtic race that came into the use of the Teuto?iic or 
 Saxon. Perhaps students of physical ethnology may thus account 
 for the contrasts of appearance in the Highlands : in one district 
 the people being large-limbed and fair, with hair inclined to red ; 
 in others, small, lithe, and dusky, with black hair."^ And in a 
 
 1 I say nothing here of the later demonstration that the Eddas owe a great 
 deal to Celtic influence. It is sufficient to judge Burton by his own lights. 
 - I. 207. Cf.. pp. 196, 233. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 209 
 
 footnote^ he quotes from the Danish writer Clement, whom he 
 admits to be a close observer, the observation that " the in- 
 habitants of the Hebrides proper, Gaelic in speech, as in all the 
 Highlands, are in their features nearer to the Norsemen than to 
 the Celts." - Here it is assumed that the strictly Celtic type is 
 actually known, though there is no pretence to show that at any 
 one period there was a whole Celtic people who presented none 
 of those mixtures of type which are in modern times found in 
 Teutonic-speaking just as among Celtic-speaking populations. 
 And yet so rooted is the prepossession of the historian that he 
 can without misgiving complain ^ that neither Tacitus nor Caesar 
 " shows a consciousness of the radical difference that must have 
 severed the Teutonic from the Celtic." As if the unconscious- 
 ness of Tacitus and Caesar were not, from a scientific point of 
 view, a reason for suspecting that the types of Teuton and Celt 
 were as much mixed in Cesar's day as later. 
 
 What seems clear thus far is that the history of the Scottish 
 nation commences with the recognition of a large Highland 
 and Gaelic-speaking population, in which a large hypothetically 
 Teutonic element has been absorbed. On one principle laid 
 down by Dr Burton, this absorption would seem to imply great 
 virtue in the Celt, for " we know that after a time the Saxon 
 race, through its native vigour, overcame the influences of the 
 Norman Conquest, as in the individual man a healthy consti- 
 tution works off the influence of a wound or a casual disease." * 
 But in Dr Burton's ethnic philosophy it appears to be a pro- 
 perty of the Celtic race to throw off (by absorbing) a prepon- 
 derating Teutonic influence through its native vigour and yet 
 remain as indolent and objectionable as ever. A thousand 
 years later in their history, the Celts still impress him unfavour- 
 ably. Deahng with the reign of Alexander (1230-45) he notes'* 
 that " Among the Irish Celts of the western and central High- 
 lands, on the other hand, this policy of planting Norman settlers 
 appears to have been very effective. It is a peculiarity of these 
 
 1 P. 196. 
 
 "^ Die Nordgermanische Welt, Copenhagen, 1840, p. 301 n. "Norsemen" 
 seems to mean, for Clement as for so many others, one Teutonic type, though 
 the Danes of medieval history are represented as dark, and their skulls are 
 described as non-Teutonic. The Norwegians, too, are assumed to have been 
 in general fair, though we find them distinguishing one of their Kings as 
 Harold Fairhair. And of course no note is taken of the presumptive Celtic 
 element in the Norwegian as in the Swedish population. 
 
 ■' L 193. ^ L 431. '•' H. 16. 
 
 O 
 
2IO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 races that they must have leaders — they cHng to the institution 
 by a law of their nature ; and if the desired dictator and guide 
 do not come in one shape, they will take him in another." In- 
 stead of asking the meaning of the latter clauses, let the reader 
 note that the "other hand" has reference to the practice of 
 the " wild men of Galloway " concerning whom it was that 
 the English ancestor of Robert the Bruce at the Battle of the 
 Standard " cried shame " on King David " for leading that 
 ruffianly band of mixed savages against the gentle Norman 
 chivalry who had befriended him." "It was like," says the 
 historian,^ "Chatham arraigning the Government for employing 
 tomahawking Indians in the American war." Now, it was to 
 this that Burton evidently alluded in his previously quoted 
 phrase about the cruelty and treachery of the Celtic race. But 
 in the present connection it appears ^ that these very Celtic 
 men of Galloway, immediately after the Battle of the Standard, 
 " put to death all the French and English strangers they could 
 lay hands on " — doing exactly the reverse, as we have seen, of 
 what was done by the Northern Celts, but very much the same 
 thing as was done by the early Saxons when they invaded 
 Britain. So that it would seem to be a peculiarity of the Celtic 
 race — a law of its nature — at once to cling to the institution of 
 leaders and to overthrow it, to accept Norman lords and to 
 kill them. 
 
 Any dispassionate reader of that sentence about the Celtic 
 need for leaders is driven to ask himself whether precisely the 
 same " law of their nature " is not evidently all-powerful among 
 the southern or Teutonic Scots at every period of their history 
 — whether it is not a law of the nature of all peoples in their 
 military and tribal period. There is only one answer. But it 
 . becomes the invariable practice of Dr Burton, as he goes on, 
 to mete out to the Highland people a different measure from 
 that he metes out to those of the Lowlands ; to blame the 
 former specially and singly for qualities and habits in which 
 they are on all fours with the latter. Again and again does 
 he gird at Celtic "peculiarities" which are not peculiarities at 
 all. "Their one great craving was for immediate leaders to 
 guide and command them. Such they found in the descendants 
 of those Norse warriors who had been their masters of old. 
 They lived under their chief, and did his bidding," etc.^ Now, 
 as the historian himself very clearly sets forth, this was exactly 
 what happened in Lowland Scotland among the "Teutons;" 
 U. 437- 'H. 15. •■TI. 388. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS, 211 
 
 for the War of Independence, as he makes plain, was carried 
 on by leaders almost wholly of Norman blood — the Flemish 
 Douglases being the only exception.^ The Lowland Scots in 
 general " craved a leader," and found him in the Norman Bruce : 
 and they clung to that leader, in their national capacity, just as 
 they habitually did in home affairs to their immediate lords, by 
 reason of a " law of their nature." Not only do the feudal strifes 
 of southern Scotland exactly answer to the clan feuds of the 
 Highlands, but Lowland or " Teutonic " Scotland as a whole 
 never showed at any part of her history the slightest fitness for 
 getting along without a King. In no country's annals is the 
 royalist principle more prominent, though in none is there more 
 record of rebellion. King after King was slain or risen against ; 
 but every rising claimed a royal head ; and nothing is more 
 remarkable in the great Civil War than the unanimity with which 
 Scotland adhered to the monarchic principle while many English- 
 men were not only ready but anxious to set up another. In the 
 face of these facts, Burton's generalisation is worthless — the 
 phrase of a partisan who catches at any stick to beat the object 
 of his prejudice. 
 
 § 3- 
 
 Other distinctions drawn by the historian will no better bear 
 investigation. " The way of the two " [the ' Goth ' and the Celt], 
 he writes, "differed in this wise, that it became the practice of 
 the one to till the soil and enrich himself, while it became the 
 practice of the other to live idly and seize upon the riches of 
 his Lowland neighbour when he could get at them." - There 
 could be no idler evasion of a plain scientific principle. Dr 
 Burton knew perfectly welP that the Scottish and English 
 Borderers habitually followed exactly the same practices as did 
 the Middle Highlanders, and this because the conditions were 
 substantially the same as regards temptation, gain, and divided 
 government. It was not that in the " dark backward and abysm 
 of time " the Aryan ancestors of the Borderers had perversely 
 developed cattle-stealing propensities, though we know that the 
 early German tribes habitually plundered the Galli and each 
 other; but that actual conditions developed these propensities 
 in the men who were called Borderers because they lived on the 
 boundaries of two hostile States. In precisely the same way the 
 
 ^ The reputed founder of the house of Douglas was Theobald the Fleming 
 (II 50), who took his title from the Celtic name of the land granted him. 
 - H. 389-90. ^ C/. VL 18, 21. 
 
212 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 later Highlanders, whose own narrowed territory was unfruitful, 
 took to plundering the rich lands of their Lowland neighbours, 
 doing it with all the more zest because these were an alien race, 
 as Borderer to Borderer. A scientific observer will at once 
 recognise that the case is not one of race bias, but of immediate 
 conditions ; but Burton almost always turned his back on science 
 when he had to with the Celts. It never occurred to him to 
 dwell on the fact that those very industrious Lowlanders were 
 the tillers of soil which their justice-loving ancestors had stolen 
 from the Celts. Land-stealing is in a different category from 
 crop- and cattle-stealing. This last is the one form of inter- 
 national piracy that Dr Burton is concerned to blame, because 
 it was the only one which happened to be open to the Celts. 
 He records not only ^ that piracy was more or less ofificially 
 carried on both by Scotland and England in the days before the 
 Reformation, but that in the beginning of the 17th century- the 
 well-to-do skippers of Teutonic Fife ^^ acquired their wealth largely 
 by that means. Yet he has no thought here of stigmatising the 
 Scottish seafaring class as habitually living by plundering their 
 neighbours on the high seas. It is only Celts who prove their 
 inherent depravity by systematically levying black mail on those 
 who come in their way. The devices of explanation to which 
 our historian is at times driven are rather more trying to gravity 
 than to temper. Returning to the Celtic problem as it stood at 
 the union of the Crowns, he promptly relapses into what we may 
 call the nescientific attitude after some pages of perfectly sensible 
 analysis of Lowland conditions. The Celts are re-ushered on 
 the scene as " this peculiar people ; " and the reminiscence of 
 their Norse elements produces this incomparable reflection : — 
 " It would appear that such mixture of a stronger element with 
 the Celtic races (sic) tends to bring the strength and determina- 
 tion of the stronger to the aggravation of the wayward, turbulent, 
 'oL and mischievous propensities of the weaker, as in the English of 
 the Pale, who were said to have become more Irish than the 
 Irish themselves." Grave historiography can thus leave far in 
 the rear the classic case of the Wolf and the Lamb, when it is 
 inspired by a prejudice wearing the guise of a theory. Burton 
 had just been telling of the waywardness, the turbulence, the 
 savagery, the brutal bloody-mindedness, of the Teutonic Border 
 
 1 IH. 70, 72. 2 VI. 66. 
 
 ^ It is to be noted, however, that Mr Grant Allen holds the people of Fife- 
 shire, with those of Ayrshire, Perthshire, and Aberdeenshire, for Celts. 
 {Anglo-Saxon Britain, p. 150). 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 213 
 
 populations ; nay, his whole history up to this point had l:)een 
 a record of chronic civil strife and inveterate lawlessness of the 
 Teutonic Scots, the " flocking and fighting of kites and crows," as 
 Milton summed up the infinite brawling of " God's Englishmen " 
 of the pure Teutonic days. Even historiographical prejudice 
 cannot evade the mute appeal of its own pages, and the parallel 
 of Borderer and Highlander is at last grappled with. As thus : — 
 " There was an old element of similarity between the Highlander 
 and the Borderer in this, that both of them indulged in theft. 
 The Borderer, however, was by nature a utilitarian and a trades- 
 man. He drove the beeves of the English because it was the 
 most profitable business he could engage in ; when the profession 
 ceased to pay \i.e., when it was suppressed] he dropped it. But 
 it was the nature of the Highlander to be idle, and feed on the 
 produce of other men's labours. It was the necessities of this 
 nature that withdrezv them from the Loivland districts, as those 
 whose nature it was to cultivate the ground pressed in on themy ^ 
 Our historian seems the very person to tell the tale of the lady 
 who fell down stairs and died of a broken heart ; and he would 
 seem capable of missing the point of the proposition that " in- 
 cantations will destroy a flock of sheep — if administered with a 
 certain quantity of arsenic." His writing here has the solitary 
 merit of enabling us to understand how Scotchmen could come 
 to be held destitute of humour. 
 
 From this point Burton's treatment of everything Celtic is, so 
 to speak, a mere debauch of the personal equation. His ultra- 
 Ricardian economics (it is a grave injustice to Ricardo to father 
 on him the unscientific erection of a mere generalisation from 
 existing practice into a prescription for all practice to come) 
 exhibits itself in the dictum - that it is a " peculiarity of the 
 Celtic nature," in the matter of the land, to be unable to 
 *' understand the arrangement by which one man was its owner, 
 while another occupied and tilled it " — a piece of sociology which 
 needs no comment beyond a reference to the rather weightier 
 decision of Mill that it is the orthodox Teuto-British land system 
 which is a peculiar thing in human history. We have once more, 
 too, the elastic theory of the dependance of the Celt on leaders : 
 — "The Lowlander, self-relying, gave as little effect as he could 
 to the feudal restraints that bound him to a leader. The High- 
 lander could not do without one. He naturally clung to anyone 
 whom nature placed in a position to coj?wiand him ; and if he 
 could not find a strong-handed warrior to take the lead, he 
 ' VL 21-22. - VL 23. 
 
214 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 \vould follow a priest or a Presbyterian minister." ^ Even as 
 did his Gothic neighbour at and after the Reformation ! But 
 things have come to such a pass with the historian's Celtophobia 
 that as he goes on he unfalteringly cites it as a fresh crime against 
 the Celts that they would not obey their leaders. At one point 
 in the campaign of 1 7 1 5 - " the Highlanders, still true to their 
 stag7ia7it principles, i-efused obedience " to their capable leader 
 Mackintosh, himself a Highlander; and in connection with the 
 earlier campaign of Montrose it is noted ^ that " they had a 
 system of discipline of their own, very lax and precarious, and 
 they would work in no other. They would follow no leaders 
 and obey no commanders but those whom the accident of birth " 
 [which had been somewhat important in Lowland history] " had 
 set over them ; and the highest military skill was lost in any 
 attempt to control them " — even when their c/an commanders 
 strove to enforce such attempts. 
 
 The addition of insult to this preposterous tissue of injury is, 
 of course, a small matter. At one place * Burton takes up for a 
 moment the suggestion, supported by historical data which he 
 does not pretend to dispose of, that under their own institutions, 
 in a p7-opiiious territory, the Celts could get on well enough ; and 
 this is how he gets rid of it : — " All doctrines are entitled to a 
 hearing (!) ; but this one leads to conclusions so unharmojuous 
 to all established belief in the blessed influences of peace and industry, 
 that it will require support from a more consolidated supply of 
 facts, than theorists about the Irish and the Highlanders are 
 generally content with " — this with some of the facts lying in his 
 own footnotes ! 
 
 " O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us ! " 
 
 § 4. 
 
 \<!q. have seen how his primary prejudice has driven the 
 historian to spurious generalisation, to false comparison, to 
 nakedly unjust inference, and finally into an undisguised fanati- 
 cism of resistance to all argument which challenged his bias. It 
 would appear that juster views had been pressed upon him ; but 
 that all pleadings had only stiffened his unreasoning antagonism 
 to the race he had maligned. It is in this frame of mind that 
 the historian arrives at his crowning generalisation : — " In a 
 naturally industrious and enterprising population, war and con- 
 
 1 Vr. 23. 2 VIII. 301. ■■ VI. 363. ^ VI. 29. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 215 
 
 fusion, no doubt, desolate the land, not only by bringing actual 
 ruin on the produce of industry, but by cutting off the industrious 
 hands. But here the people are indolent, and content with the 
 bounties supplied to them by nature. If their population increases 
 beyond a balance with the natural supply of these bounties, they 
 starve. Thus do we find, by logical conclusion, a race among 
 whom war and murder have a wholesome social tendency ; and 
 it is added to the wrongs committed on the Celt that the laiu and 
 order to zvhich he has been reduced under the rule of the Saxon have 
 driven him to starvation." ^ 
 
 This laborious insult is the one semblance of a suggestion, in 
 Burton's eight volumes (so far as I can remember), that " the Celt " 
 has ever been wronged at all. He at times quotes ^ a testimony 
 to Celtic valour and endurance ; he necessarily admits, while 
 assuming Norman influence,^ the immense effect of Welsh litera- 
 ture on that of Europe ; he concedes, suicidally enough, that the 
 simplicity of rank among the Celts, in strong contrast to the 
 nomenclature of the German Empire, " was a contrast, too, at 
 variance with the usual notions of the Celtic character, as being 
 showy and boastful ; " ^ and he could not well suppress the fact 
 that when, at the beginning of the i 7th century, the Crown con- 
 fiscated a large part of the Hebrides, including the whole of the 
 Lewis, the Lowland cultivators who were introduced, " after the 
 usual harassments attending an unsuccessful colonisation, returned 
 to their Lowland homes, tired and disappointed, in the year 
 1609."^ Nor could he evade mention of the fact that alike 
 in the Highlands and in Ireland " the Celt was excluded from 
 the privilege of the law of peace and war ; *" " though he sought, 
 somewhat like Carlyle, to balance matters by dwelling on the 
 counter atrocities of the Irish. But of any perception that fate 
 may be tyrannous to peoples as to men, of any scientific compre- 
 hension of the not very obscure sociological problem in hand, these 
 volumes give no sign. Under stress of prejudice the historian 
 becomes misleading even in his facts. By way of enforcing his 
 fallacious proposition that the Celts are bad sailors, he states 
 that when the whale-fishing was at its height, the whalers " used 
 to complete the complement {sic) of their crews from Peterhead, 
 Orkney, and Shetland, but never from the Hebrides or the West 
 Highlands," " forgetting the accepted view as to the large Norse 
 element in the Hebrides, and failing to ascertain the well-known 
 fact that in our own day the royal navy has been largely recruited 
 
 1 VL 30-31. -^ vr. 28. •" L 172. •* VL 32. 
 
 *VL37. « IV. 341. "VL25. 
 
2l6 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 from these very Hebrides. In a note on language ^ he asserts 
 that Lowland Scotch has taken virtually nothing from the Celts 
 — only " a few words expressive of things existing in the High- 
 lands, as gilly, claymore, pibroch, and the like." As against this. 
 Professor Mackinnon tells us that Jamieson's Dictionary includes 
 several hundreds of Celtic words; and that where Gaelic-speaking 
 and English-speaking Briton meet on something like equal terms, 
 as in Canada, where the scattered population is not dominated 
 by the presence of a literary order, the reaction becomes in- 
 creasingly apparent. And when the historian asserts - that " men 
 of Irish race, even where they have been for generations severed 
 from their country by the Atlantic, fight out in the streets of the 
 American cities the feuds that shook the British empire in the 
 seventeenth century," we are bound to answer that as a general 
 statement this is not true, and that the Celt in America is not 
 more "clannish" than the Lowland Scot. Where facts thus go 
 astray, it is not to be expected that taste will be right : and we 
 accordingly have from the implacable historian the decision that 
 whereas " the Lowlander's plaid was generally of plain light and 
 dark squares, the Highlander, indulging the natural taste of a 
 lower civilisation, delighted in more gaudy colours." ^ A footnote 
 discloses that the last-century writer Martin, in his Account of 
 the Western Isles,* paid tribute to the "great deal of ingenuity 
 required in sorting the colours, so as to be agreeable to the nicest 
 fancy." But no foreigner would have learned from Burton that 
 the " higher civilisation " of the Lowlands had in his own day 
 eagerly adopted the very tartans in question ; and it would only 
 be by watchful induction he would discover that the colourless- 
 ness of the Lowland garb a hundred and fifty years ago was one 
 of the results of the atrophy of art at the Reformation. 
 
 It would be unwarrantable to omit notice of the one passage 
 in which, near the end of his work. Burton does something like 
 justice to the Celt on one item — the good behaviour of Prince 
 Charles' men in Edinburgh. The concession is sufficiently 
 qualified : — " It is among the most remarkable instances of the 
 influence which a change in surrounding conditions may have 
 on a people signally retentive of bad practices, that there should 
 have been so little plunder in their marches or their abode in the 
 towns. This may be accounted one of the steps in a moral 
 change which has made the Highlanders of the present day re- 
 markably exempt from predatory offences. There are few humble 
 
 1 VHI. 544. - I. 175. •' VHI. 52S. ■* P. 207. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 21 7 
 
 people among whom property is more safe from aggression than 
 the still poor dependents of the Highland thieves of old " ^ 
 
 So habituated has the historian become to regarding the Celt 
 as something " peculiar," that even in verbally recognising such 
 an influence as that of "conditions," he must needs term "remark- 
 able " a phenomenon perfectly normal and natural, and in the 
 same breath proceed to speak as if the remaining bad practices 
 of the Highlanders were perversely independent of causal con- 
 ditions. \Vhen he is dealing with the prevalence and the mis- 
 chief of smuggling in the Lowlands, he never thinks of attributing 
 the evil to a " signal retention of bad practices " : here the 
 economist as w^ell as the Teutophile traces the cause to unwise 
 fiscal legislation. But with the Celt it is different. It is no 
 longer his nature to steal : it even becomes his nature to be 
 honest, so that his honesty perhaps does him no great credit; but 
 it is still his nature to be spontaneously objectionable somehow. 
 And after the one concession, the historiographer proceeds to 
 the other detractions above noted, and revels at length - in a 
 demonstration of the "peculiarity" that among the Highlanders 
 before the '45 the gentlemen of the clan were large, strong, and 
 well-fed, and the humbler people small and ill-fed ; throwing in 
 a final self-annihilative hint that perhaps the ruling caste were 
 at bottom " of a Gothic race " and only the others truly Celts ! 
 As if he had not been describing a social phenomenon common 
 to every nation in the civilised world ! And as if that ruling caste 
 were not on his own showing a main factor in all the vices of 
 cruelty, indolence, and predacity which he has all along been 
 charging on " the Celt ! " 
 
 Such is the fashion in which the best and completest History 
 of Scotland deals with that section of the Scottish people which 
 has given its race-name to the nation, and which, since its real 
 union with the rest, has taken an ever-increasing share in the 
 national performance of every order. One does not call the 
 historian's method ungenerous : one does not look to him to be 
 generous but to be in the barest sense just — that is, to be scien- 
 tific ; and on the contrary he is found carrying injustice to the 
 extremes of farce, and compendiously leaving science out of the 
 question. I should be sorry to seem, in discussing such mal- 
 feasance, to overlook the merit, the learning, the judgment, which 
 mark the work in other regards, and which will probably keep it 
 long in possession of the field even if all the foregoing strictures 
 become unquestioned commonplaces. They point to an almost 
 1 VHL 458. - VIH. 524-5. 
 
2l8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 unique flaw in the historian's intelligence, which will doubtless 
 be one day classed as one of the follies of the wise. But the 
 flaw is at least serious enough to call for this much exposure. 
 Human folly becomes rather a dismal thing when it strikes a 
 deep rift of unreason through the laborious work of an industrious 
 and capable scholar, and leaves the readers for whom he wrote 
 divided between disgust and derision. In the circumstances the 
 best service all round would seem to be to try to show precisely 
 the extent of the flaw. 
 
 § 5- 
 It remains to seek for critical explanations ; and in looking for 
 the causes of Burton's wrongdoing, as we have sought reasons for 
 more general historic phenomena, one finds some light in the 
 antecedents. To begin with, his Celtophobia seems to have 
 been partly developed by way of a crude sociological reaction 
 against the way of looking at things Celtic which had been set 
 up or strengthened by the sympathetic genius of Sir Walter 
 Scott. After centuries in which Lowland Scots and Englishmen 
 alike had been wont for the most part to regard the Highlander 
 as an insufferable savage, Scott suddenly presented him to the 
 world in colours of poetry on a background of thrilling romance. 
 Scott indeed had not begun the sympathetic movement : the 
 falsetto prose-poetry of " Ossian," concocted by Macpherson on 
 the nuclei of fragments of genuine old Celtic poetry, had had, 
 despite damaging criticism, a wonderful success throughout 
 Europe, supplying as it did a new flavour to a w^orld which 
 was on the way to breaking with worn-out convention and 
 tradition in many things ; and the new romantic movement 
 set up in Germany tended in the same direction ; so that there 
 was a set of taste towards things Celtic before Scott reinforced 
 it. Indeed, before his time one of the ablest of Scotch scholars, 
 Pinkerton, had had to battle with a good deal of uncritical 
 doctrine concerning supposititious proto-Celtic civilisation.^ But 
 
 ^ The rejection of later forms of this doctrine is the sole reasonable element 
 in the work entitled Celticism a Myth, l^y J- C. Roger, F.R.A.S., etc., (2nd 
 ed. 1889) a brawling book, whose spirit may be gathered from its deliver- 
 ances : — "I believe that no man of Celtic race ' ever attained real greatness 
 in literature, science, art, political or military life,' only, I very much doubt 
 if such a thing as ' pure Celtic blood ' anywhere exists " (pp. 14-15) : " ^ am 
 content to believe myself of that great Teutonic stock which has ruled the 
 world in the past, and will rule it to the end of time " {p7-ef.). Such are the 
 judgments and tempers to which Burton's ethnography appeals. 
 
HILL BURTON ON THE CELTS. 219 
 
 Scott's genius at once multiplied tenfold what movement there 
 was, creating not only in Scotland and England but in France 
 and Germany an aesthetic passion for everything Highland. 
 And the salutary result remains to this day, in the modern 
 habit among Lowland Scots of broadly identifying their country 
 with its " Celtic " population, who are so much the most 
 picturesque element in it — this despite all the efforts of Burton, 
 and despite the fact that in the national poet, Burns, there is 
 practically no trace of the new spirit.^ 
 
 It was against this attitude, which had been popular for a 
 generation before, that Burton reacted ; and he did so not 
 merely because of his prejudice but because of the way in 
 which that had been reinforced by his training. One of his 
 earlier works is a forgotten treatise on Political Economy, 
 peculiarly arid in its kind, which shows him to have been 
 one of the narrowest of the post-Smithian school of laissez- 
 faire capitalism and competition. Such a thinker, unless safe- 
 guarded by a special sympathy, was almost sure to resist what 
 he would regard as the sentimental way of looking at Highland 
 life, past and present ; and it is instructive for progressive 
 people to-day to reflect that much of what stood for Liberalism 
 in Burton's youth — the middle-class revolt against landlordism 
 — could be thus fatally narrow in its view of an important 
 social problem, while the Tory Scott, often narrow and foolish 
 and bigoted enough in his attitude to different problems, could 
 yet in virtue of his literary instincts and sympathies rise to a 
 humaner and saner view - where many of the so-called Liberals 
 were hidebound in class prejudice.^ Nowhere was the narrowing 
 down of Smith to commercial purposes more zealously pursued than 
 in Scotland ; and Burton was influenced by the specialists in the 
 study. Somewhat thus it came about that the fibre of wooden 
 prejudice in his personality survived all the rationalising influence 
 of the utilitarianism of Bentham, whose works he edited, and of 
 the analytic philosophy of Hume, whose Life he wrote. Burton 
 seems to have been a man in part naturally cut out for a bigot, 
 
 ^ Burns's poem to "Highland Mary" — inferior work as it is — would no 
 doubt help to create good feeling ; but he shows none of Scott's interest in the 
 past of the Highland race. 
 
 - Mr Bonar, it is true, remarks of Scott's pictures in Waverky and other 
 novels that "it is the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than 
 the misery of the clansmen" {Malthus and his Work, p. 189). But, granting 
 this, it remains true that Scott takes a sympathetic view of the clansmen as 
 men. Compare Rob Roy. 
 
 2 Cp. Macaulay (chap. XVH., end), as to Tories and Irish last century. 
 
2 20 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 who somehow was delivered from the religious bigotry of his 
 native land only to become an unavowed rationalist with a certain 
 sociological bigotry in place of a religious. His sociological 
 training, such as it was, had doubtless much to do with his 
 notably impartial treatment of a number of national and religious 
 issues in Scottish history which before his time had almost never 
 been treated impartially ; but his narrow economics, derived from 
 M'Culloch, coinciding with his irrational prejudice against the 
 " race " which a kindlier sentiment had been idealising among 
 his countrymen and elsewhere in recent times, served to make 
 him a typical bigot among historians in regard to that theme. 
 For him, Celtic history was to be read in terms of the gospel, not 
 of Ricardo, who, be it repeated, was a scientific analyst, but of 
 the adaptors of Ricardo, who were the mere champions of the 
 modern commercial form of society. And the fact that the very 
 high-priest of that cult, of whose economics his own was a restate- 
 ment, bore a Celtic name ^ while exhibiting an ideally " Saxon " 
 stolidity of temperament, seems never to have availed to shake 
 Burton's confidence in his machine-made solution of the Celtic 
 problem. The Celts had remained poor : then it must be 
 because they were not industrious. They had been cattle- 
 stealers at a later period than most of their Lowland neighbours : 
 then they were hereditarily prone to theft. Highland agriculture, 
 albeit on the worst land, was worse than Lowland : then the Celt 
 was anti-agricultural. Q. E. D. His own belief appears to have 
 been that a large percentage of the Highland population was of 
 Teutonic descent ; yet he could not so far curb the animus under- 
 lying his knowledge as to abstain from setting down the backward- 
 ness of the whole Gaelic-speaking population to " Celtic " blood. 
 
 The folly of it all is made clear to the intelligence even of the 
 man in the street by the abundant commercial success of the 
 Highland element in Glasgow ; and by the all-round success of 
 the same element in Canada and in every other British colony. 
 But the written folly remains, to stimulate still the unreason of 
 the unreas'onable when a new question of racial spite arises ; yet 
 also to hold up the writer to wiser readers in days to come as a 
 warning of the havoc that a prejudice can work in the intelli- 
 gence of a historian. 
 
 ^ While the Gordons, Frazers, Chishohiis, and some other clans, are loosely 
 classed as "Norman" because called by the names of Norman chiefs, and 
 others are similarly classed as Norse and Flemish, the IMacCiillochs seem to 
 pass as " Celts," though the Macaulays are said to be Norse, like the Macleods 
 and Macdougalls. 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 
 
 It is with much change of feeHng that one proceeds from a 
 criticism of Burton's treatment of the Celtic element in Scottish 
 history to a study of John Richard Green's treatment of the 
 Celtic element in early English history. The procedures are 
 as different as the men. Green's sympathetic and kindly nature 
 was incapable of the stolid animosity which, as we have seen, 
 lowers Burton's history in this connection to a mere string of 
 inconsistent aspersions. Green had not had his philosophy of 
 life prematurely moulded, as was Burton's, by a sectarian con- 
 ception of political economy ; and he was constitutionally free 
 of the wilful obstinacy which meets reason with accumulations 
 of sophistry. He seems to have gone on growing mentally to 
 the end, inwardly reshaping his creed in spontaneous loyalty 
 to all new light that reached him. Hence there is something 
 ungrateful in the task of criticising him, especially when one 
 remembers his avowal : " I am only too conscious of the faults 
 and oversights in a work much of which has been written in 
 hours of weakness and ill health," and when one recalls the 
 worn fine face presented by his portrait. It may be possible, 
 however, to set forth some of the shortcomings of his work, in 
 the present connection, without wounding the sympathies he so 
 justly inspired, and without making light of his real merits. 
 
 The " Short History of the English People " stands out from 
 its predecessors and rivals in respect of the constant vivacity 
 with which it seeks to bring home all episodes and phases of 
 history to the living recognition of the reader. Green is not 
 content to narrate, or even to comment : he must almost 
 dramatise the most distant and fugitive facts, he must generalise 
 the vaguest forms of knowledge, in a fashion which seems a 
 blend of the method of the literary pulpit and the method of 
 Carlyle. And the wish, in itself so laudable, to make all know- 
 
222 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 ledge vital and didactic, finally runs away with the historic 
 function, so that we get word-pictures with colours in them 
 that are not to be found in the authorities, and generalisations 
 so frequent and so far in excess of the real knowledge in hand 
 that they would move us to distrust even if they did not con- 
 stantly contradict each other. This, however, they do. Green 
 was so possessed by the impulse to generalise that he undertook 
 to reduce to formulas the whole facts of the life of every generation, 
 alike in periods where his matter was too scanty to allow of any 
 save the slightest inference, and in periods where the matter is so 
 abundant and complex that inference must needs be vigilant to 
 the uttermost. And his abundant generalisations are so lightly 
 come by, so hand-to-mouth, so wanting in circumspection, that 
 they upset each other faster than the considerate reader can 
 scrutinise them. To read Green's pages, accordingly, is often 
 to have the sensation of turning a kaleidoscope. Full as he was 
 of a brave industry, it is pathetically intelligible that he should 
 have recoiled from facing the truth that sound thinking is apt 
 to be hard work — harder than even hard reading. His book, in 
 short, has the " defect of its quality." Its great merit is the con- 
 stant play of ideas, the constant stimulus to thought. Its great 
 •demerit is the lack of care with which the ideas are thrown out, 
 the failure to check one by another, and to subject all to critical 
 revision. 
 
 We have here to consider how his way of work exhibits itself 
 in his occasional handling of the question of Celtic and Teutonic 
 race-differences. That he set out with an unreasoned Teutonic 
 bias is shown at the outset by his singular dictum that " no spot 
 in Britain can be so sacred to Englishmen as that which first 
 felt (!) the tread of English feet."^ He wrote for a nation of 
 which millions must be descended from non-Saxon ancestors ; 
 and those first comers to whom he points were, on his own 
 showing, troops of ferocious rufifians, who tossed babies on their 
 spears. We might as reasonably reverence the cannibals of an 
 earlier stage in our ancestry, or the pithecoid men of an earlier 
 stage still. Yet Green makes the appeal for reverence in all 
 seriousness. And that he set out with some of the old cut-and- 
 dry ethnological presuppositions is shown by his comment on 
 the literature of mediaeval Wales : " In the Celtic love of woman 
 there is little of the Teutonic depth and earnestness " '^ — a phrase 
 which tells of all the arbitrary absurdity that has ever entered 
 into the discussion. In Green's own history before this time 
 ^ Short History, p. 7. - A/., p. 157. 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 223 
 
 there is absolutely nothing to show any special " depth and 
 earnestness " in the Teutonic love of woman ; and it is the fact 
 that the earliest English literature in which there is any show 
 of imaginative depth and earnestness in the treatment of sex 
 love — apart from Chaucer, who drew on the French trouvcres 
 — is Malory's rendering of the Welsh Arthurian legends. The 
 sole basis for the dogma is the old datum as to the monogyny 
 of the ancient Teutons, — a monogyny which, supposing it to be 
 real, we have seen to be presumably a matter of their climatic, 
 economic, and culture conditions, like the monogyny of the 
 working class in Turkey at this moment, since we know it to 
 have been followed by gross profligacy as soon as the race 
 entered on luxurious conditions of life. That Green was but 
 thoughtlessly echoing a current formula is shown by the more 
 spontaneous comments which follow on that cited. On the 
 strength of one sentence from Gwalchmai he finds the Welsh 
 lover a little of a butterfly, but full of a " childlike spirit of deli- 
 cate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light 
 of dawn on a snowy mountain-peak," and so on, as he puts it in a 
 style which may or may not be Teutonic. But after another 
 citation he decides that " the touch of pure fancy removes its 
 object out of the sphere of passion into one of delight and 
 reverence." Then is the spirit of " delight and reverence " some- 
 thing distant from that of " depth and earnestness ? " Or is it 
 " passion " that constitutes the latter qualities ? And is it in 
 modern Germany, where the average wife is more of a domestic 
 servant to her husband than in either England or France, that 
 we are to look for the deep Teutonic development of "passion," 
 as compared with the " Celtic " forms of it seen in the fiction 
 and the life of modern Gaul ? 
 
 When we work down to the bases, or at least the first forms, 
 of Green's conception of the two race-natures, we find that his 
 whole plan consists in characterising as special to the race what- 
 ever for the time being it happens to say or do. In one page,^ 
 we read of the Northumbrian peasantry in the days of Cuthbert 
 that " with Teutonic indifferetice they yielded to their thegns in 
 nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded to 
 the king " — an odd illustration of the " depth and earnestness " 
 of the race's character. " But they retained their old supersti- 
 tion side by side with the new worship : plague or misha]) drove 
 them back to a reliance on their heathen charms and amulets " 
 — even as fickle Celts might go. Turning the leaf, we find - 
 ' P. 25. - P. 27. 
 
2 24 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 that "CKdmon is a type of the new grandeur, depth, and fervour 
 of tone which the German race was to give to the rehgion of the 
 East " ; and Caedmon and the Germans get credit for a new 
 and lofty conception of the devil. " The human energy of the 
 German race, its sense of the might of individual manhood, trans- 
 formed in Credmon's verse the Hebrew Tempter into a rebel 
 Satan, disdainful of vassalage to God" — as if Oriental legend 
 had not given the conception to the West ready made. But 
 even in the defiance of Satan " we catch the new pathetic note 
 which the N'ortJiern melancholy was to give to our poetry " ; and 
 the " English temperament " is declared to have shown " its sense 
 of the vague, vast mystery of the world and of man, its dreamy 
 revolt against the 7iarrow bounds of experience attd life." Turning 
 back to the chapter on Welsh literature, we find ^ that " the 
 sensibility of the Celtic temper ... is tempered by a passionate 
 melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible." Thus 
 can men draw up characters for nations. Yet again, the Teutonic 
 mind is credited ^ with re-creating the doctrine of the Atonement 
 by " an elaborate code of sin and penance, in which the principle 
 of compensation, zuhich lay at the root of Teutonic legislation, 
 crept into the relations between God and the soul." As if the 
 said principle of compensation were not developed to the utter- 
 most in the Judaic code to begin with ; and as if that were an 
 illustration of " new grandeur, depth and fervour of tone," in 
 religious thought. 
 
 On the general sociological question, Green's decisions are 
 just as ill-established. He sets out, of course, with the assump- 
 tion that the Teutonic invaders killed all of the Britons who did 
 not fly to Wales or Cornwall. " The extermination of the 
 Briton was but the prelude to the settlement of his conqueror. 
 What strikes us at once in the new England is, that it was the 
 one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome."^ 
 This proceeds upon the phraseology of the Saxon Chronicle, 
 which tells how, for instance, when (Ella and Cissa beset 
 Anderida they " slew all that were therein, nor was there after- 
 wards one Briton left." But we know that this kind of state- 
 ment is often of no value in old narratives by writers better 
 informed and more trustworthy than the retrospective Saxon 
 chroniclers. CiBsar in the second book of his Commentaries on 
 
 1 P. 156. - r. 30. •■' P. II. 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 225 
 
 the Gallic War, as we have seen, speaks of the Nervii as virtually 
 exterminated in his great battle with them, whereas they are 
 found energetically at war with him again in the fifth book. He 
 had put down his impression of the facts at the time of the 
 great battle : it afterwards turned out to be a mistake ; yet he 
 did not rectify his first statement. It is extremely unlikely, 
 from all we know of the Germanic tribes, that they would not 
 try to take captives, to make them slaves. Green indeed admits ^ 
 in this very connection that " it is possible that a few of the 
 vanquished people may have lingered as slaves round the home- 
 steads of their English conquerors; and z.feiv of their household 
 ivords (if these were not brought in at a later time -) mingled 
 oddly ivith the English tofigue." Oddly indeed, if there were so 
 few survivors. All the real evidence points to the absorption, 
 despite bloody massacres, of a large part of the conquered race, 
 here as elsewhere. Green expressly states ^ that in the conquest 
 of South-eastern Wales by Offa in the eighth century, "as in the 
 later conquests of the West-Saxons, we find the old plan of 
 extermination definitely abandoned. The Welsh who chose to 
 remain dwelt undisturbed among their English conquerors." 
 Now, the value of the record at this point is high ; whereas in 
 regard to the account of the proceedings of the fifth century it 
 is very low. And Green admits ^ that " we hardly know any- 
 thing of the conquest of Mid-Britain, and little more of the 
 conquest of the North." In all probability Offa compromised 
 so readily with the Welsh just because there was already a great 
 deal of Welsh blood in Mercia. Other scholars are now satisfied 
 that many Britons were left in Central as in Western England, 
 in the district of Deira, now Yorkshire, in Northumberland, 
 Durham, and the East Scottish Lowlands.^ And that Green 
 had been proceeding less on his own study than on a foregone 
 conception is shown by the oblivious way in which, after insert- 
 ing the above cited passage on the absorption of the Eastern 
 Welsh, he describes*^ the outcome of the Danish invasion of 
 the ninth century : — 
 
 " The first sight of the Danes is as if the hand on the dial of history 
 had gone back three hundred years. The same Norwegian fiords, 
 the same Frisian sandbanks, pour forth their pirate fleets as in the 
 
 1 P. 10. 
 
 - Query, What time? The " few " words are found to amount to some scores. 
 » P. 39. ■* P. 15- 
 
 . ^ Prof. Sullivan, in Eiuyc. Brit, art on Celtic Literature. 
 6 Pp. 42-43. 
 
 P 
 
2 26 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 days of Hengest and Cerdic. There is the same wild panic as the 
 black boats of the invaders strike inland along the river reaches, or 
 moor round the river islets, the same sights of horror — firing of home- 
 steads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery and shame^ 
 children tossed on pikes or sold in the fnarket-place " [this after the 
 express denial that there was any attempt by the first Saxons to keep 
 captives] "as when the English invaders attacked Britain. Christian 
 priests were again slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden, for the 
 Danes were still heathen. Letters, arts, religion, governments dis- 
 appeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of old. But 
 when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government 
 reappeared unchanged ; England still remained England ; the Danes 
 sank quietly into the mass of those around them ; and Woden yielded 
 without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between 
 the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between men of 
 different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, 
 between Englishman and Welshman. . . . Nowhere over Europe was 
 the fight so fierce because nowhere else were the combatants men of 
 one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the 
 Northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and complete." 
 
 All the risks of the didactic-picturesque method of writing 
 history are here signally illustrated. We had just been told of 
 the complete and peaceful fusion of a mass of Britons with the 
 Saxons under Offa, despite the difference of race and language ; 
 and we are to learn a few pages further on ^ that in the Scotch 
 Lothians " the Scot kings were absorbed into the mass of their 
 English subjects, and renounced their old Gaelic for the English 
 tongue." We are in the same breath told that the fusion of 
 Saxon and Dane came by way of an excessively fierce struggle, 
 and that it was exceptionally " peaceful and complete " because 
 of the identity of race. We are further told that "Woden yielded 
 without a struggle to Christ." Yet on the next page we learn 
 that the readiness of Northumbria, Mercia, and East-Anglia to 
 accept of the Danish overlordship, as being preferable to that 
 of the West-Saxons, " was another sign of the enormous difficulty 
 of welding these kingdoms together into a single people " : and 
 for a number of pages further we are to read of the retention of 
 Danish laws where the Danes were strong, of the treacherous 
 massacre of Danes in the year 1002, and of the four years of 
 Swegen's revenge ; the chapter closing with the statement that 
 *' Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria remained separate political 
 bodies which no efforts of force or policy seemed able to fuse." 
 
 ' V. 53- 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 2 2/ 
 
 The formulas as to fusion without change are merely haphazard 
 rhetoric, which is summarily quashed by the fresh generalisation 
 in the next chapter ^ that 
 
 " Under Dane, Norman, or Angevin, Englishmen were a subject 
 race, conquered and ruled by foreign masters ; and yet it was in these 
 years of slavery that England really became the England that we 
 know.''^ 
 
 It becomes clear that Green generalised on the spur of the 
 moment, as he went along, without pausing to check one thesis 
 by another, without any going back to reconcile the medley. 
 The result is that one almost ceases to attach any value to his 
 summaries of periods. In the revised and illustrated posthu- 
 mous edition published a few years ago, some of his generalisa- 
 tions are silently transformed, such as that on the legendary 
 outcry of England against King John's submission to the Pope ; 
 but that is only one of many hasty propositions, being indeed 
 partially based on apparent documentary evidence, whereas many 
 of his general statements are gratuitous formulas, reached by 
 imagination. 
 
 § 3. 
 
 Returning to his estimates of Celtic and Teutonic character 
 values, we find him yet again cancelling some of the most notable 
 of his own generalisations. At the outset we are struck by the 
 fact that, churchman as he was, he is ready to see more good in 
 heathenism than in the contemporary Christianity ; and indeed 
 it is notable that, with his temperamental bias to a religious view 
 of things, he is as a rule unhesitating in his avowals of the 
 historic demerits of his order and his church. But it seems 
 as if often it were only sentiment driving out sentiment. " The 
 rage of the [Saxon] conquerors," he writes - " burnt fiercest 
 against the clergy. River and homestead and boundary, the 
 very days of the week, bore the names of the new Gods who 
 displaced Christ. But if England for the moment seemed a 
 waste from which all the civilization of the world had fled away, 
 it contained within itself the germs of a nobler life than that 
 which had been destroyed." Now, it is possible to construe the 
 last sentence in a way which will reduce it to abstract truth ; but 
 the process reduces it at the same time to insignificance. As it 
 stands, it inevitably suggests that the old British society was not 
 only imperfect but contained within itself no " germs " capable 
 1 P. 60. - P. 12. 
 
2 28 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 of development. That would be a monstrous statement, seeing 
 ■ that on a similar basis to that of British Gaul was reared what- 
 ever of progressive civilisation Europe reachieved. The Britons 
 certainly had among them as many " germs " of nobler life as 
 had the ferocious horde who invaded them. Nor does Green's 
 own history, finally, give the slightest proof that there ivere any 
 " germs of nobler life " among the first Saxon invaders. He 
 explicitly admits later, as we have seen, that after five hundred 
 years of chronic intestine war the English seemed no nearer 
 ^^ peaceful organisation than at the start; and the slight progress 
 the race made in civilisation in that immense space of time was 
 . wholly due to foreign influences — the influence of the lettered 
 ^^ ) Romish priesthood, Irish and Continental, and of European 
 commerce. Why then is the formula about '' germs " presented 
 to us ? All that survives of the proposition, on scrutiny, is the 
 abstract fact that after some six or seven hundred weary years of 
 semi-barbarism and bloodshed, including a fresh murderous con- 
 "^ quest of Saxondom by Danes, and a further murderous conquest 
 I of the whole by Normans, there were to ensue some develop- 
 ments of art, science, and letters. If more then be asserted — if 
 it be meant that the life of the first Saxons was nobler than that 
 of the Roman Britons, the disproof lies in the next few pages. 
 The invaders were admittedly semi-savages, who tossed children 
 on pikes, flogged slaves to death, and burned alive women who 
 ran away from bondage. It is only the long subsequent life of 
 their remote descendants, mixed with foreign races, that can be 
 pretended to show any progress in ethics. Would the historian 
 then have ventured to suggest that the same or higher develop- 
 ments could not have taken place on the bases of the Romano- 
 British civilisation had these been left untouched by Teutonic 
 barbarism ? It seems inconceivable ; yet if he did not mean 
 that the whole passage is but verbiage. 
 
 And when we turn to his record of and comment on the early 
 history of the Irish Church, it would seem as if the idea of there 
 being some " nobler germs " in Teutonic than in Celtic blood 
 had been at least temporarily in Green's mind. He has a passage 
 on the relative development of the Irish and English churches 
 which almost necessarily implies that assumption, though it is 
 confounded many times over by his own later propositions. 
 
 " Trivial, in fact, as were the points of difference which severed the 
 Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion 
 Northumbria should belong [in the seventh century] was of immense 
 moment to the after fortunes of England. Had the church of Aidan 
 
J. K. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 2 29 
 
 finally won [in the dispute on the keepin,^- of Easter by the Eastern or 
 the Western calendar] the later ecclesiastical history of England would 
 probably have resembled that of Ireland. De^'oid of thai pozuer of 
 07-gcmisation which ijas the strcnj^ih of the Roman Church, the Celtic 
 Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the country as 
 the basis of church government. Trivial quarrels and ecclesiastical 
 controversies became inextricably confounded : and the clergy, robbed 
 of all really spiritual i)jfiuena\ contributed no element save that of 
 disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast re- 
 ligious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of 
 piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing 
 influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is the 
 picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was 
 from such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of 
 Rome in the Synod of Whitby." ^ 
 
 Here again we have a generalisation made from hand to mouth, 
 under some sectarian side-influence, without regard to the bulk 
 of the relevant facts. It might be summarily disposed-of by 
 reference to the simple facts that Ireland later became the typi- 
 cally docile branch of the Roman Church, and that a few pages 
 earlier - the historian had been exhibiting the early Celtic Church 
 as possessing an unparalleled power of organisation. 
 
 " While the vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was 
 exhausted in a bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained un- 
 scourged by invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such as it 
 has never known since. Christianity had been received there with a 
 burst of popular enthusiasm, and letters and arts sprang up rapidly 
 in its train. The science and Biblical knowledge which fled from the 
 Continent took refuge in famous schools which make Durrow and 
 Armagh the universities of the West. The new Christian life soon 
 beat too strongly to brook confinement within the bounds of Ireland 
 itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island, had not been half a 
 century dead when Irish Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into 
 battle with the mass of heathenism which was rolling in upon the 
 Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among the Picts of the 
 Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern seas. An Irish 
 missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the 
 Apennines. The canton of St Gall still commemorates in its name 
 another Irish missionary . . . [beside] . . . the Lake of Constance. 
 For a time it seemed as if . . . Celtic and not Latin Christianity was 
 to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West." 
 
 ' Pp. 28-29. - 1'. 21. 
 
230 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 This is a sufficiently headlong account of the matter ; but in any 
 case it quashes once for all the other passage cited as to the 
 inherent lack of power of organisation in the primitive Irish 
 Church. It is difficult co understand how one man could write 
 both. 
 
 What happened in Ireland later, obviously, was not any 
 mysterious loss of " power " of organisation, but simply a 
 natural absorption of the sections of the Church into the 
 different political interests, just as the Romish Church itself 
 broke up later, and the Anglican still later, and as the Churches 
 in England at this moment are being divided by the conflicting 
 interests of classes. The early missionarism represented no 
 united Irish Christianity, but simply certain centres of Christian 
 zeal set up in Ireland. That the clergy "contributed no 
 element save that of disorder to the state " is true of ancient 
 Ireland as it is substantially true of all Christendom, age after 
 age. And the historian, after speaking of the Irish priesthood 
 as being in a special degree "robbed of all really spiritual in- 
 fluence," goes on obliviously to avow again and again that the 
 English clergy, despite their Romanised organisation, were in the 
 same case. We track these avowals through centuries of the 
 record. Of the sequelae of the Norman conquest we are told ^ 
 that 
 
 " The occupation of every see and abbacy by strangers who could 
 only speak to their flocks in an unknown tongue converted religion from 
 a superstitio7i to a reality as it passed from the priest to the people, and 
 ]icrtnit a7id friar carried spiritual life home to the heart of the nation 
 at large." 
 
 Just before, under Edward the Confessor, 
 
 " The Church sank into lethargy. . . . Stigand, the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, was the adherent of an anti-pope, and the highest dignity 
 of the English Church was deliberately kept in a state of suspension. 
 No ecclesiastical synod, no Church reform, broke the slumbers of its 
 clergy."" 
 
 Again : ^ 
 
 " The Conquest, as we have seen, had 7-obbed the Church of all 
 moral power "— 
 
 — exactly what was said to have happened in Ireland through 
 Celtic deficiency in " power of organisation." To be sure, there 
 
 ' r. 60. - p. 66. ■' r. 86. 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 23 1 
 
 is a fresh somersault to be turned when, after the account of the 
 horrors of cruelty and anarchy in the reign of Stephen, we learn ^ 
 that " England was rescued from this chaos of misrule by the 
 efforts of the Church " — the simple fact being that the then 
 Archbishop of Canterbury took an active part in inviting Henry 
 the Second to come to England to secure the succession to the 
 crown. After that, we revert to the status quo. In the satire of 
 Walter Map, in the thirteenth century, 
 
 " Picture after picture strips the veil from the corruption of 
 the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret 
 immorality." ^ 
 
 As for the Roman organisation, Archbishop Langton, " church- 
 man as he was, protested against the royal homage to the Pope"^ 
 rendered by King John ; and the Pope in turn formally annulled 
 the Great Charter.* As regards culture, physical science, " so 
 long crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism," ^ was 
 only revived by Moslem contact. The Roman organisation 
 flourishing, "presentations to benefices were sold in the papal 
 market, while Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings 
 of the Church," so that a large section of the population 
 declared that they "preferred to die rather than be ruined by 
 the Romans."^ Thus the salutary organisation found that "its 
 religious hold on the people was loosening day by day ; " *" 
 and when an Archbishop of York was excommunicated, " the 
 people blessed him the more, the more the Pope cursed him," 
 even as might have happened in Hibernia. And it was not only 
 the gifted organisation of Rome, with its power of curing chaos, 
 that thus worked ill. England, saved from chaos, was yet toler- 
 ably chaotic : — 
 
 " The same loss of spiritual power, the same severance from national 
 feeling, was seen [13th c] in the English Church itself. Plundered 
 and humiliated as they were by Rome, the worldliness of the bishops, 
 the oppression of their ecclesiastical courts, the disuse of preaching, 
 the decline of the monastic orders into rich landowners, the non- 
 residence and ignorance of the parish priests, robbed the clergy" — 
 once more ! '•'' of all spiritiial infliie7tcc^^^ 
 
 Thus it came about that, when forced by Edward I. to take part 
 in Parliament, the clergy " sat jealously by themselves," and 
 finally " flung away a power which, had they retained it, would 
 
 1 1'. 99. - 1'. 115. ■■ r. 122. ■* P. 125. 
 
 M'. 133. «I'. 139. -p. 143. «P. 144- 
 
232 Tin-: SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 have ruinously hampered the healthy development of the state." ^ 
 So that the generalisation as to the blessed differentiation between 
 the systems of the English and Irish branches of the Catholic 
 Church ends in smoke. 
 
 Who will may follow the track further, noting the English 
 Church in the fourteenth century as " shrivelled into a self- 
 seeking secular priesthood " " — " Never had her spiritual or moral 
 hold on the nation been less^" — small as it has seemed at all 
 points of our survey. " If extortion and tyranny . . . severed 
 the English clergy from the Papacy, their own selfishness severed 
 them from the nation at large."* And so on, through the ages, 
 till we learn, ^ after the Restoration, that the Church of England 
 " stands alone among all the religious bodies of Western 
 Christendom in its failure through two hundred years to devise a 
 single new service of prayer or praise." We are forced to con- 
 clude that the historian, after putting down certain generalisa- 
 tions at a venture, has forgotten all about them, making fresh 
 generalisations of contrary purport with no sense of anything being 
 wrong. Thus one by one every general principle he has laid 
 down concerning Celtic and Teutonic characteristics is destroyed 
 by his own commentary as well as by his narrative. 
 
 It is unnecessary, in this connection, to carry criticism of 
 Green's work any further. I am the less desirous to do so 
 because, apart from the conventional falsisms above dealt with, 
 he shows no persistent racial animosity. His account of the 
 later relations betw^een Ireland and England is substantially im- 
 partial, and when he speaks*^ of the "tenacious obstinacy" of 
 the Celtic race, it is not with any air of making " tenacity " a 
 vice in Celts, as is done at times by those wiseacres who quote 
 Caesar on the fickleness of the Galli and make " persistence " a 
 merit in Teutons. Green's history, in fact, becomes more solid 
 and more sober as he approaches the modern period, in which 
 he was supposed to take a less vivid interest, but for which he 
 had so much more material, so much better guidance, than 
 for his presentment of what he later called " the making of 
 England " — in defiance of his own avowal that the making of 
 England took place from the Danish Contjuest to the time of 
 Edward the First. His weakness for hand-to-mouth generalisa- 
 
 1 P. 174. - P. 216. ■' P. 227. ■ 
 
 ■* P. 230. ■' P. 610. *' P. 444. 
 
J. R. GREEN ON CELTS AND TEUTONS. 233 
 
 tion subsists, of course, even when he gets past that period ; so 
 that among others we have the unhappy dictum ^ that the 
 invention of the Cabinet system by Lord Sunderland, " a man 
 whose poUtical character was of the lowest type," at a time when 
 the character of Parliament had fallen about as low, proves the 
 " inborn political capacity of the English mind." But it is 
 significant that Green's worst miscarriages occur where, dealing 
 with the remote facts of race history, he catches at those formulas 
 of race characterisation which, as we have seen, are in origin 
 but the devices of unscientific men to make ignorant prejudice 
 pass for knowledge. That such a sympathetic spirit could be 
 satisfied with such formulas is indeed a reason for refusing to 
 suppose that they always promote malice, or that it is merely 
 malice which embraces them ; but on the other hand the tissue 
 of contradiction into which they have led such a historian is one 
 more lesson to others, if any more be needed, of the utter vanity 
 of racial prepossessions as lights on racial history. Green was 
 without doubt a conscientious historian ; but the study of him 
 leaves us realising that the ideal historian must be more con- 
 scientious still. He must learn that his reflections, his theories, 
 his generalities, need to be as narrowly tested as his facts — nay, 
 much more narrowly, because where a fact may be established 
 by a few documents, a sound generalisation can be framed only 
 by taking into account at once all the relevant facts known, and 
 reasoning on them with a vigilance of logic proportionate to the 
 scope of the truth at stake. 
 
 1 P. 6S1. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 
 
 It is a somewhat piquant fact in the sociological discussion 
 over Ireland that one of the most zealous, vivacious, and in- 
 genious of the special pleadings against " the Celt " in his Irish 
 aspect is the work of one who is commonly regarded as a Celtic 
 chief. Whether the Duke of Argyll be really a Celt in any sense 
 is put by himself in a little doubt. He speaks ^ of " Scotchmen 
 who, like myself, have the same special share that he [Edward 
 Bruce] had in the ancient Celtic blood of the Irish Scoti." Now, 
 the Bruces were a Norman house, who had married into the 
 Scoto-Celtic royal family after it had been mixed with the Saxon 
 line, so that the " special share " of the ancient Celtic blood in 
 their veins must have been very special indeed to be recognis- 
 able. If the Duke is not more Celtic than that, he may 
 feel quite complacent over the difference between his ancestry 
 and that of most of the men who pay his rents. Under the 
 guidance of Dr Hill Burton, many of our modern Highland 
 chiefs have had that solace. 
 
 For the purposes of this discussion, however, it matters very 
 little how " the MacCallum More " ^ came to have his Celtic 
 name and following. We have to do with his Grace's politics 
 and historiography, not his pedigree. He has the creditable 
 status of being one of the very few Dukes who can write ; and 
 in his Irish Natiofialism : an appeal to History, he has done 
 something to meet the reproach of Mr Gladstone, that Unionists 
 as a rule fight very shy of history. He has indeed given Mr 
 Gladstone a fall on the very ground on which he so confidently 
 challenged attack ; the Duke's great advantage in the polemic 
 being that he had some of Mr Gladstone's historic formulas to 
 
 ^ Irish Natiojialisni, p. 114. 
 
 2 "The great MacCallum" — the proverbial Gaelic appellation of the head 
 of the house of Argyll. Galium seems to equate with Campbell, which is pro- 
 nounced Cammel ; but the name as spelt is traced to the form Gampobello, 
 and so connected with the Normans. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 235 
 
 grip upon. Mr Gladstone is an inexact and unscientific writer 
 and thinker, who in a dispute of any breadth is pretty sure to 
 give fine opportunities to an antagonist ; and the Duke of Argyll 
 in this case makes the very most of those presented to him. 
 Not that he in turn is exact or scientific : he is really not more 
 so than Mr Gladstone, whose intellectual history corresponds 
 rather closely in some ways with his own. In both men the 
 decisive intellectual limitation exhibits itself in their way of 
 maintaining the opinions in which they were born and bred ; 
 and if Mr Gladstone has in certain respects delivered himself 
 from his inheritance where the Duke has not, it may be rather 
 by reason of the pressure of accidents, of political circumstances, 
 than by force of any greater capacity of overruling prejudice at 
 the behest of truth. What neither man has ever done is to pass 
 through the discipline of reluctantly realising that certain of his 
 inherited beliefs are delusions, and of reaching sounder con- 
 viction, not by way of mere adaptation to circumstances but by 
 dint of patient analysis and loyal logic. And it may be said 
 with confidence that no man ever attains efficiency as a thinker 
 who has not gone through that experience. The final mark 
 of philosophic mediocrity (by which is not at all meant medio- 
 crity in general capacity) is a persistent adherence either to in- 
 herited dogmas or to opinions which are merely the expression 
 of self-interest. When it is possible to feel concerning a dis- 
 putant, that if born a Mohammedan he would have defended 
 Islam as he defends Christism, or that if born a workman or 
 peasant he would have disliked landlordism as much as he now 
 esteems it, he ceases to be for us anything like a first-rate in- 
 tellectual force. And that, unfortunately, is how Mr Gladstone 
 and the Duke of Argyll, industrious reasoners as they are, have 
 taught us to feel concerning them. In the case of the Duke one 
 sometimes wonders whether a totally different fortune, to begin 
 with, might not have developed in him a more valid capacity. 
 Born to the purple, and desultorily educated, he began in his 
 youth vindicating the opinions he had received from his sur- 
 roundings, exhibiting in the process intelligence, dexterity, fair 
 application, literary talent — everything but that vital power of 
 reconsideration, that height of outlook, which marks a man out 
 as really a true or great thinker. Had the young peer been a 
 young commoner, born to labour rather than to dilettantism, he 
 might perchance have turned out differently. But then a peer 
 has such boons of leisure and freedom of view, that if he has but 
 the requisite brain convolutions he ought surely to come to the 
 
236 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 use of them, ^\'e end by suspecting that the defect is con- 
 genital, and that, save for what might have been gained to each 
 mind by a rational culture and discipline from childhood, the 
 Duke and Mr Gladstone alike have made the most of their 
 potentialities. 
 
 In this case, the result is indirectly edifying. Mr Gladstone, 
 after living to a ripe age in the midst of affairs, suddenly published 
 his decision that it would be a good thing to concede Home Rule 
 to Ireland. He states as the reason for the suddenness of his 
 decision that he could not before 1885 have foreseen that Mr 
 Parnell and his party would be willing to accept Home Rule 
 without Separation.^ Yet Mr Gladstone does not pretend that 
 he had ever indicated willingness to concede Home Rule to 
 those who formerly asked for it, without Separation. He avows 
 that the subject had been in his mind before the time of his 
 decision, and that he had yet never taken one of his colleagues 
 into his confidence. He contends that this was a perfectly 
 proper line of action.- And such is his idea of the way in which 
 great political reforms are to be carried, that he apparently ex- 
 pected his party in mass to accept his decision, and to grant 
 Home Rule to Ireland, without preparation, without gradual 
 persuasion, without any semblance of a transition stage between 
 the attitude of utter repudiation of Home Rule and the attitude 
 of acceptance. To judge from this and other declarations, Mr 
 Gladstone believes that the business of a political leader is not 
 to educate the electorate, not to plan future courses on principle, 
 not to create any body of coherent political opinion, but simply 
 to wait for the upshot of elections, and propose bills in terms 
 of the position of parties. This last, as a matter of fact, is what 
 he did in the case of Home Rule. But inasmuch as he con- 
 tinued to agitate vigorously for Home Rule after his first defeat, 
 in the face of a heavy majority, it is clear that he does not con- 
 sistendy adapt his policy to the state of parties, but that on the 
 contrary he strives determinedly to bring the balance of parties 
 round to his policy, 07ice he has embraced o?ie. The trouble is, 
 that his choice of policy to begin with, though always the expres- 
 sion of a real concern for justice and righteousness, has never 
 been guided by any reasoned set of political principles. He is, 
 in brief, an opportunist ; and the reason why he has had so much 
 success of esteem as well as of achievement is that after all he 
 is an opportunist with a conscience — a paradoxical combination 
 which has bewildered as well as exasperated opponents. If Mr 
 1 special Aspects of Ike Irish Question, p. 5. - IJ., p. 6. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 237 
 
 Gladstone had fought connectedly and foreseeingly for good 
 causes, taking them up on principle before he was in any way 
 coerced to it, with half the zeal and power with which he has 
 fought for them after they had become identified with his leader- 
 ship and his retention or recovery of power, he would easily rank 
 as the best and greatest of modern statesmen. As it is, he still 
 ranks among the most benevolent ; but for the advantage given 
 by his moral prestige the cause of Liberalism has had to pay a 
 heavy penalty in chronic confusion and loss of character for 
 consistency. 
 
 As regards the Irish question, Mr Gladstone's later utterances 
 of course condemn his earlier practice, or at least convict him of 
 long failure to see what he now declares to be the truth. \Vhen 
 he was of mature age, he applauded the Act of Union, which he 
 now declares to have been a disgraceful performance. In his 
 old age he began to indict England as the cause of all Ireland's 
 woes from the Strongbow invasion onwards. If the truth be so, 
 he ought to have known and acted upon it long ago, the history 
 of the matter being as legible to him then as now. Reaching 
 his conclusions thus behind time and in haste, he has put part 
 of the case loosely and rhetorically : and here it is that he gives 
 the Duke of Argyll his opportunity. " Who," Mr Gladstone 
 asked, in reply to some of the customary charges of Englishmen 
 against the Irish, — " Who made the Irishman ? The Irish, in 
 very old times indeed, if you go back to the earlier stages of 
 Christianity, were among the leaders of Christendom. But we 
 went among them : we sent among them members of our own 
 race. These were mixed with the Irish ; and ever since our 
 blood has been mixed with theirs there has been endless trouble 
 and difficulty." ^ This, of course, is very loose rhetoric. The 
 Irish had ceased to be in any sense leaders in Christendom for 
 centuries before the Norman invasion ; their life had been full 
 of trouble and difficulty during these centuries, and before ; and 
 their civilisation showed few or no signs of progress at the 
 moment of Norman intervention. The " we," too, is of course 
 a very loose way of speaking. To identify ourselves with our 
 supposed ancestors of seven hundred years ago can help nobody 
 to realise past events. By the use of such language, Mr Glad- 
 stone has given critical people the right to distrust him as an 
 interpreter of political history. Even when he asserts that " Ire- 
 land for more than seven hundred years has been part of the 
 British territory, and has been with slight exceptions held by 
 
 ^ Speech cited from Times, ^Lly 12, jSSj. 
 
238 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 English arms, or governed in the last resort from this side of 
 the water," ^ he is gratuitously misleading, seeing that during 
 whole centuries of the period marked-off, Ireland was only in 
 small part held by English arms, or governed from England in 
 first or last resort. Such assertions as these, with many others 
 by less responsible politicians than Mr Gladstone, are among 
 the stumbling-blocks of the cause of Irish Nationalism. False 
 historic statement gives opponents their best opportunity. And 
 the Duke of Argyll's book on Irish Nationalism, which he calls 
 an appeal to history, is in the main a forensic parade round these 
 random sentences of Mr Gladstone, varied by cuts at similar 
 utterances of O'Connell, and politer attacks on some of the 
 historical verdicts of Professor Richey and Mr Lecky. 
 
 For its own part, as might have been expected, the Duke's 
 book is as one-sided in spirit, and fully as misleading in purport, 
 as the accounts given by the school of O'Connell, which was 
 merely forensic with a difference ; and it can in no way compare 
 as a sociological survey with the works of Dr Richey and Mr 
 Lecky. The Duke admits these writers to be in the main 
 laudably impartial historians. No critic could make that admis- 
 sion concerning the Duke. He begins by vehemently lamenting 
 that " Truth in the hands of a casuist, morals in the hands of a 
 Jesuit, facts in the hands of a special pleader, — all these com- 
 bined are but a feeble image of the fate of history when it is put 
 to use by professional politicians. And when this position is 
 held by any man who is, or finds it convenient to assume the 
 character of an Ethnogogue,- then the corrupting influence is 
 aggravated to an intense degree." On this one is led to ask 
 what character the Duke supposes himself to be playing in this 
 work ? Does he suppose he is not a special pleader, not a pro- 
 fessional politician ? Does he suppose that if it constitutes a man 
 an Ethnagogue to plead the cause of Ireland against England, 
 he is no Ethnagogue who maintains on the contrary that England 
 has been substantially blameless, and Ireland always to blame ? 
 
 For that is the Duke's thesis, put baldly. As we shall see, he 
 feels bound occasionally to assume the virtue he has not, and to 
 avow that in a certain sense, under special qualifications, and 
 with careful reservations, " England " may be said to have some- 
 times played an ill part in regard to Ireland. But that is only 
 an agreeable forensic strategy : the Duke's purpose, the purport 
 
 ^ Special Aspects, j). 109. 
 
 ^ This word has been coined by Mr Gladstone, who however spells it 
 "ethnagogue." {Special Aspects, \>. 269.) 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 239 
 
 of nine-tenths of his book, is to make out that Irishmen have 
 been generally in the wrong and Englishmen generally in the 
 right, in regard to Irish troubles. To this task he brings the 
 methods of all the types whom he has so ingenuously subordin- 
 ated to the professional politician — to wit, the casuist, the Jesuit, 
 the special pleader. And it remains a historic fact that he is all 
 the while a professional politician — as much so as Mr Gladstone, 
 whose colleague he once was. He has held office ; he seeks to 
 influence elections ; he has his personal and his class interests to 
 serve as a legislator. 
 
 But, putting aside questions of qualification, let us take the 
 Duke's work on its merits. We may pass as substantially valid 
 the bulk of his polemic against Mr Gladstone and O'Connell 
 on the subject of the so-called conquest of Ireland in the twelfth 
 century. We may even admit that it was worth while to contro- 
 vert erroneous statements on that head. It is the device of the 
 disingenuous critic, when a point in controversy has been made 
 clear by polemic, to pretend that the polemic was not worth 
 while. When errors are reiterated by prominent men, it must 
 always be worth while to expose them, if there is to be any con- 
 cern at all for truth as truth. The Duke, then, is entitled to his 
 measure of triumph, though, to be sure, it cost him no great 
 research to get at the facts about the invasion of Ireland under 
 Henry II. Even at this stage, however, it is necessary to expose 
 the misrepresentations with which the Duke contrives to pack his 
 side of the case while protesting against misrepresentations on 
 the other side. 
 
 1. He asserts^ that "even the Romanised natives of Britain" 
 had a " splendid literature and art " beside which those of early 
 Christian Ireland " pale a feeble and ineffectual light." This is 
 simple nonsense. The sole literary work left by Roman Britain 
 is the history of the monk Gildas, which is certainly not splendid. 
 
 2. He deliberately takes "^ one of the oldest entries in the 
 Annals of the Four Masters, that for the year i o of the Christian 
 era, telling of a massacre by Carbre the Cat-headed, and sets it 
 down as genuine history ; proceeding next to take an entry for 
 the year 227, which tells how Dunlang king of Leinster killed in 
 Munster " thirty royal girls " and " a hundred maids with each of 
 them." No critical reader can accept such a record, with such 
 a date, as real history. It has every appearance of being a 
 redacted myth.^ 
 
 ' Irish Natiotialisiit, p. 17. - /</., p. 23. 
 
 ' Cp. Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 63-64. 
 
240 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 3. In picturing the Irish people during the first seven centuries 
 of our era, the Duke carefully suppresses the fact that the peoples 
 of Anglo-Saxon England lived just such a life of internecine war 
 as did the tribes of Ireland, and that the Saxon invaders of 
 England killed not only women but babes. 
 
 4. Alleging that the condition of Ireland from the date of the 
 establishment of Christianity, about 450, went "from bad to 
 worse " for six hundred years — a statement as loose as any of 
 Mr Gladstone's — the Duke asserts^ that "this steady and con- 
 tinuous decline had gone on notwithstanding long contact and 
 perfect familiarity with the high civilisation of Roman Britain." 
 This is really a much worse sample of " inflated fable " than any- 
 thing the Duke cites from Mr Gladstone. The sole justification 
 offered for the statement I have italicised is the following : — 
 
 " Hundreds, and even in some cases thousands, of Roman coins have 
 been found in Ireland — coins of tlie first and second centuries. For 
 some centuries the Irish were continually attempting to conquer 
 Britain. For ten years in the middle of the fourth century they are 
 said to have at least partially succeeded, till beaten and expelled by 
 Theodosius in 369. It cannot be said, therefore, that isolation alone, 
 so far as mere knowledge is concerned, was the cause of the long con- 
 tinuance of Irish barbarism. They had seen what civilisation was, 
 and what government meant. And having seen both, the Irish chiefs 
 returned to their own country as chaotic as before, and as incapable 
 of laying even the rudest foundations of civilised condition among their 
 own people." 
 
 From this it may be seen what manner of critical conscience 
 rules the Duke, with all his indignant outcry over the " inflated 
 fable " of Mr Gladstone. He builds up a case of concrete 
 censure of the early Irish on the merest shadow of foundation. 
 He has not given the semblance of a proof of a " long contact 
 and perfect familiarity " on the part of the Irish with the civilisa- 
 tion of Roman Britain. Hoards of coins prove nothing but 
 plunder. Such a statement, on such evidence, really amounts 
 to fabrication. The statement that the Irish chiefs " had seen 
 what government meant," and that they returned " incapable of 
 laying even the rudest foundations of civilised condition," is mere 
 reckless romancing. The Duke cannot possibly know whether 
 the Irish chiefs in question did or did not try to set up new 
 foundations among their own people, or what they saw in Britain. 
 He is making a series of specific assertions without the slightest 
 
 ^ Work cited, p. 25. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRLSH HLSTORY. 24 1 
 
 knowledge to justify them. And it is after the extravagant passage 
 above cited that he has the phrase, '^But even these facts, strik- 
 ing though they be, are an inadequate exposure of Mr Gladstone's 
 ' inflated fable.' " 
 
 Already it is easy to see in what a spirit of prejudice and 
 partisanship the Duke had entered on his task. It may be said 
 for him that he was provoked by the inaccuracies of Mr Gladstone, 
 and by the common Irish tendency to make out Ireland always 
 white and England always black in their interrelations. But if he 
 had looked into the matter with some of the philosophic temper 
 to which he constantly makes pretension, he would have seen 
 that the Irish charges against England are constantly being in- 
 spired by gratuitous English attacks on Ireland. A hundred 
 times during the present century Irishmen have approached 
 England with simple appeals for legislative redress, saying 
 nothing of old wrongs ; and invariably they have been met 
 with the answer that their troubles are their own fault ; that it 
 is their incompetence for industry or agriculture or what not, 
 their shiftlessness and their Celticity, that keeps Ireland back- 
 ward. It was Mr Bright who pointed out, in his pre-Unionist 
 days, how the appeals of Ireland for help had been met " often 
 by denial, often by insult, often by contempt." That stupid 
 English censure should be met by sharper censure of England 
 as the immemorial oppressor and barbariser of Ireland is a 
 matter of course. And if Englishmen are never to be wiser 
 than the Duke of Argyll, the recrimination may go on forever. 
 As we have seen, he meets extravagance with extravagance, and 
 spleen with spleen. Always claiming to be dispassionate and 
 philosophic, he never for more than a breath gets outside of 
 the atmosphere of reciprocal vituperation. 
 
 At times, as I have said, he does come within sight of a 
 scientific standpoint. For instance, such a passage as this : — 
 
 " The first and most fundamental of all Irish disadvantages is 
 geographical position. It was a condition involving a long train of 
 consequences. It segregated Ireland from the great stream of 
 European histor>\ It precluded her from the unspeakable benefits 
 of Roman conquest. It kept her away from the civilisation of the 
 Latin Church. It effectually prevented her later subjugation by any 
 superior race. It stereotyped barbarous customs, and prolonged 
 them even to our own day. All happier influences seemed to stop 
 when they landed on the shores of England. There they remained ; 
 and nobody cared to push across that narrow sea, into a land covered 
 with dense forests and bogs, inhabited by fierce tribes with no posses- 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 sions tempting to a comparatively civilised intruder. In later days 
 England seemed to intercept geographically even the benefits of 
 commerce. I have heard the feeling on this matter strikingly ex- 
 pressed by a very clever woman of Irish blood and of Irish marriage, 
 tlie late Lady Clanricarde — the daughter of George Canning, and the 
 sister of Lord Canning, Governor-General of India. 'You,' she said 
 addressing an Englishman, 'have always been like a high garden 
 wall standing between us and the sun.'" 
 
 But even here we have the Conservative animus. The writer 
 here suppresses facts which he has elsewhere recognised : he 
 even states the reverse. It is not true that the geographical 
 position of Ireland " effectually prevented her later subjugation 
 by any superior race " — unless the Duke means that the English 
 were after all not a superior race. He knows that Ireland was 
 effectually subjugated by England at least thrice, — under Eliza- 
 beth and James, under Cromwell, under William. And when he 
 says that England seemed to intercept geographically even the 
 benefits of commerce, he knows perfectly well that England had 
 first of all wilfully and zealously striven to destroy the commercial 
 advantages of Ireland. And when he further puts it that every 
 enemy tried to get at England through the back door of Ireland, 
 he will not see that if England had conciliated instead of oppress- 
 ing Ireland the enemy would have had no more chance at the 
 back than at the front door. 
 
 The Duke goes on to point out how far the lack of coal in 
 Ireland has determined the different development of the parts of 
 the British Islands in recent times. But he is evidently much 
 more happy when he is charging economic sins on the Irish 
 Parliament of last century. And the why is obvious. To re- 
 cognise the past relation of the countries as one in which the 
 people of Ireland suffered inevitably in the nature of things, 
 " England " helplessly playing the part of the high wall between 
 them and the sun — to recognise this would be to admit that it 
 is now the business not only of " England " but of the English 
 legislature to do something to counteract the fatality, which 
 ceases to be irresistible when it is understood. But of course 
 the Duke of Argyll cannot agree to any such course. He is 
 pledged to keep Ireland subordinate to England ; pledged to 
 keep the mainly agricultural country under a system of govern- 
 ment which, relatively tolerable in a mainly industrial country, is 
 in the other fatal to well-being. So he must perforce fall back 
 on all manner of charges against the Irish people — must seek 
 to convince himself and others that the fault lies not in the 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 243 
 
 land system of which he is a champion and a representative, and 
 from which he gets his wealth, but in the people who pay the 
 rents and get the worst of it. 
 
 When the Duke is not directly scolding the Irish, ancient 
 or modern, he is indirectly representing them as congenitally 
 inferior to their neighbours. Thus when he is dealing with the 
 Hibernization of the Normans in Ireland (a fact which might 
 serve to illustrate for any one the truth that it is environment 
 and not race that determines civilisation), he treats the pheno- 
 menon as a sad succumbing of the good to the bad, a deplorable 
 yielding not merely of good manners to evil communications, but 
 of the higher species to the lower. 
 
 " Even in Scotland," he writes,^ " we did not altogether escape the 
 Irish danger. Those colonists of Norman blood — and they were 
 many — who pushed forward beyond the central and eastern area in 
 which all the civilisation of Scotland has begun, and from which alone 
 it spread — those Normans who wandered far into the predominantly 
 Celtic area, and who married and settled there— were often tempted 
 to fall, and did sometimes actually fall, under the same influences by 
 which the Anglo-Irish were so fatally seduced." 
 
 Now, from the point of view of rational sociology, the pheno- 
 menon dealt with simply proves that the Normans in question 
 were themselves but slightly civilised, and had in them no 
 civilising virtue. It is not true that, as the Duke says, they 
 " carried onwards and upwards " the preceding civilisation in 
 England. It was not they, not the invaders, who did the 
 carrying on ; it was the culture behind them. Their civilisa- 
 tion was absolutely dependent on the post-Roman, with which 
 they had been lightly inoculated in France ; and save for fresh 
 and prolonged contact with Europe, Norman England would 
 have stagnated just as did Saxon England. The Norman, in 
 fact, got his civilisation, such as it was, through the medium of 
 a race which was presumably kindred with that which he en- 
 countered in Ireland and in " Celtic " Scotland. There were 
 civilised " Celts " before there were civilised Normans. Then 
 the Duke of Argyll's way of putting things — the tactic of ascrib- 
 ing to the Normans "strong and manly natures" and to the 
 Irish an innate bias to anarchy — is a mere appeal to race 
 prejudice. Believing himself to be in the main a Norman, 
 he does but play the ethnagogue in his own house. 
 
 In no other way does it seem possible to explain the Duke's 
 
 1 P. 47- 
 
244 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 chronic relapse from the semblance of social science into the 
 language of the race-partisan. He quotes in one place ^ with 
 approval the remarkable utterance of Henry the Eighth's Irish 
 Council in 1533 : — "As to the surmise of the bruteness of the 
 people, and the incivility of them, no doubt, if there were justice 
 used among them, they would be found as civil, wise, and polite, 
 and as active as any nation." " This," says the Duke, " is the 
 truth " ; and he admits the abundant testimony of English writers 
 in the Tudor period to " the many elements of natural genius 
 and virtue in the Irish character." - Yet he leaves standing, 
 without a misgiving, such phrases of his own as : " that great body 
 of the Celtic people in the very soil of tvhose mind these ancient 
 [semi-barbaric] customs were i7idelibly rooted'''' ^^ and "a flaw due 
 to the inei-adicabk effects of the old Irish character." ■* His admis- 
 sion as to the excellences of the Irish character in Tudor times 
 is of itself enough to overthrow his whole anti-Irish case ; for by 
 his own showing these merits had been developed in an age in 
 which England had only partially begun to control Irish life. 
 He is always arguing that in the centuries between Henry II. 
 and Elizabeth there had been no possibility of effective English 
 rule, and that the native life was a mere tissue of warfare, 
 massacre, and anarchy. Yet it is out of that state of things that 
 there comes a people for whom, by the admission of English 
 men of affairs, there was needed only justice to make them " as 
 civil, wise, and polite, and as active as any nation." Then there 
 is something wrong with the Duke's picture. Speaking with his 
 own voice, the voice of the landlord and the hereditary legislator, 
 he says,^ 
 
 " It cannot be too often repeated that what was peculiar to the 
 Celts of Ireland was the survival and even the exaggeration of this 
 custom [coyne and livery] and other equally barbarous customs for 
 long centuries, during ivliich all other 7-accs had gro%v7i out of them 
 and cast them off." 
 
 Here again we have something worse than inflated fable. The 
 implication is that other northern races by virtue of their pro- 
 gressiveness rose above customs in which the Celts remained 
 immovable. This is essentially untrue. Not one of the northern 
 races " grew " out of barbarism. One and all were aided or 
 levered out, by the direct or indirect force of the political and 
 cultural civilisation which had anciently grown up in the re- 
 gion of the Mediterranean, and which spread to north-western 
 
 1 P. 147. '^ P. 149. ■■ P. 59. ^ P. 114- ' T- 5^- 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLE ON IRISH HISTORY. 245 
 
 Europe by way of Italy. It is true that the northern races, once 
 moved, repeatedly reacted for good : such reaction is one of the 
 great forces of progress in civilisation ; and the recognition of 
 it, one would think, might once for all lead all civilised races 
 to bury their animal jealousies and barbaric antipathies, knowing 
 that each can in some way help all. But that the northern races 
 would never have reached civilisation save for the southern con- 
 tact is clear from every stage in their early and mediceval history ; 
 and the one difference between the Irish and the other northern 
 peoples was simply that, as the Duke of Argyll elsewhere unwit- 
 tingly admits,^ they were "geographically so situated as to be cut 
 off from all the reforming and renovating currents of European 
 history " — England supplying no such aid. Even this admission 
 the Duke cannot make without interjecting that the effect of 
 survivals " is enormous among Celts especially, and most enor- 
 mous of all among Irish Celts " — this in speaking of Irish life at a 
 period when Ireland had been three times colonised by England, 
 and concerning which Mr Lecky (whom the Duke at this point 
 does not attempt to impugn) decides, on the authority among 
 others of Sir John Davies that the Irish population had by that 
 time become predominantly Anglo-Saxon ! - 
 
 If the reader has any doubt left as to the element of race bias 
 in the Duke's mind, he may have it cleared up by the passage 
 in which his Grace expresses himself on the subject of the Irish 
 share in the English invasion of Scotland. It is a singular 
 sample of self-revelation : — 
 
 " If we are to allow ourselves to be irrationally affected in our read- 
 ings and judgments of history by either racial, family, or even the 
 lower forms of national sentiment, I should heartily sympathise with 
 the famous attempt of Edward Bruce to do in Ireland a work at least 
 superficially like the great work his brother had done in Scotland. 
 Scotchmen who, like myself, have the same special share that he had 
 in the ancient Celtic blood of the Irish Scoti — who admire as we all do 
 the heroic character of 'The Bruce' — who ay-e disposed to remember 
 with resei7tmc7it the ready help which Iris/uiie/i then gave, and often 
 have since given, to the enemies of .Scottish liberty, — we might be 
 tempted to cherish a natural sympathy with the invasion of Ireland 
 by the Bruces in 1315. But for those who look in History, above all 
 
 1 Pp. 233-234. 
 
 - .\s above stated, I do not accept the estimate of Davies. lint the Duke 
 does not reject it ; and in any case the English inference hud l)een ovtr- 
 whehning. 
 
246 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 things, for the steps of human progress, and who desire to know the 
 causes of its arrestment or decline, it is impossible to be guided by such 
 cJiildisJi scntinientsP ' 
 
 The last sentence is open to question, if the Duke means it 
 to appl)' to himself. The only way to escape being guided by 
 childish sentiments is to cease to entertain them. But the Duke 
 ingenuously confesses that he does entertain them. He is 
 actually " disposed to remember with resentment " — resentment 
 against Irishmen — the fact that when the Edwards invaded 
 Scotland they had in their host Irish contingents, these con- 
 tingents being led by Anglo-Irish baro?is, who brought into the 
 field, at their overlord's behest, their Irish retainers. Knowing 
 this, stating this, the Duke asserts ^ that " the Irish of both breeds 
 did their very best to rivet the yoke of England on the rising 
 kingdom which had been established in Scotland by the happy 
 union and common allegiance of both the Celtic and Teutonic 
 races there." I can only say that this way of writing history 
 seems to me miserably unworthy of a statesman. Before reading 
 the Duke's book, I could not have believed that any educated 
 man in Scotland was capable of harbouring a grudge against 
 Irishmen in the mass because certain Norman barons in Ireland 
 about the thirteenth century led to Falkirk and to Bannockburn 
 some troops of the poor devils of kerns over whom they ruled. 
 I have seen nothing in anti-English writing by Irishmen to 
 compare with the Duke of Argyll's remark that in respect of that 
 episode *' the Irish of both breeds did their best " to subject 
 Scotland, when as a matter of fact, as he has just been noting, 
 a number of the really Irish chiefs just afterwards invited Edward 
 Bruce to come and be their king and deliver them from the 
 English. The Duke may well talk of being "irrationally affected" 
 by racial and familial and the low^er forms of national sentiment. 
 His own avow^ed sentiment is irrational to the last degree. If it 
 were in any way rational it would be extended to England, the 
 real aggressor in the case; whereas the Duke (being a "Norman" 
 and an English landholder) is resentful only tow^ards the sup- 
 posititious descendants of the Irish kerns whose Norman leaders 
 led them against Robert the Bruce — descendants who are in 
 these days to be presumed to be Home Rulers. Perhaps the 
 finishing touch of the whole absurdity is this, that the pre- 
 decessor (I suppose he was not the ancestor : the Duke's 
 family got its lands in another fashion) of the lord of Argyll 
 
 ' I'p. 114-115. -P. 113. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 247 
 
 in the time of the Scottish War of Independence zvas the 
 zealous liege?nan of the English khig. I do not remember how 
 the genealogies go ; but when I went to school in Scotland 
 we were taught, among other things, that the Lord of Lome 
 was one of the most determined enemies of Robert the Bruce, 
 who on one occasion had much ado to escape his blood- 
 hounds. Surely his Grace of Argyll might have let those 
 sleeping dogs lie. 
 
 It would be unprofitable, if it were not a little wearisome, to 
 go in close detail through the polemic of a writer who meets the 
 charges of Irishmen against England by taunting them with the 
 fact that some of the presumable ancestors of some of them 
 assassinated the elder brother of Brian Boru. Let it suffice, then, 
 to summarise the Duke's argument against Irish nationalism. It 
 may be condensed thus : — 
 
 1. England, after intervening in Ireland, was not at all in a 
 position to complete her conquest. Therefore she is not to be 
 blamed for having failed to civilise Ireland in the period between 
 Henry II. and Henry VIII. Besides, anything the Irish suffered 
 for a long time after 1315 was due to their own fault in inviting 
 Edward Bruce. 
 
 2. England was nevertheless bound to keep her foot in Ireland, 
 and so to prevent any civilising contact between it and any other 
 European State. 
 
 3. Irishmen having been thus "left to themselves," they alone 
 are to blame for all their troubles between 11 72 and 1534) ^'^ i" 
 the ages before. " The Irish made themselves." 
 
 4. In 1535, Irish Catholicism set up a new danger for England, 
 so that she had to conquer Ireland afresh. Confiscation was a 
 natural part of such fresh conquest, and was justified "upon 
 every ground which has been universally acted upon by all 
 nations and governments in the history of the world. There is 
 not a civilised people now existing in Europe which is not living 
 on ' confiscated land.' " ^ 
 
 5. In the same way, Ireland had to be subjugated afresh under 
 Elizabeth in the interests of Protestantism, Protestant England 
 being then "the one great mainstay and defence of all the 
 liberties, political and intellectual, of the civilised world." - Any- 
 thing done to that end cannot be chargeable against England. 
 
 6. As the seventeenth century was " mainly occupied by the 
 completion of the necessary work of conquest," it " must be 
 ivithdrawn absolutely from our reckoning of the time during 
 
 ip. 174. -P. I S3. 
 
248 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 which Ire/and 7vas in any proper sense of the term under the 
 Govermnent of Enghind^ ^ As for the stealing of Irishmen's 
 land by covetous Englishmen, " we may well ask whether it 
 is worse to covet land for the purpose of planting a higher 
 civilisation than to covet cattle for no other purpose than that 
 of mere plunder and robbery."- And as regards the persecution 
 of Catholics, we must remember that on the continent Catholics 
 persecuted Protestants. Besides, Catholics in general were always 
 wanting to destroy Protestantism. Therefore England was quite 
 justified in wanting to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. And 
 whereas Catholics were religious persecutors, Protestants were 
 thus acting merely on political grounds. They had to harry the 
 Irish people in order to spite the Pope, because the Catholic 
 Church had "inspired the atrocities of Alva in the Low Countries, 
 and dictated the Massacre of St Bartholomew in France " ^ — in 
 the previous century. In short, the conduct of England towards 
 Ireland in the seventeenth century was "dictated by motives, and 
 under conditions, of almost insuperably coercive strength."* 
 
 7. In the eighteenth century it was very much the same. 
 England no doubt acted on a selfish policy towards Ireland, 
 " but England was not one whit more selfish than all other 
 nations at the same time ; and she acted on precisely the same 
 policy, not only towards Scotland but towards her own Colonies 
 and Plantations."^ So Irishmen had nothing special to complain 
 of. Besides " commercial restrictions are harmless examples 
 indeed " of exclusive dealing " compared with other applications 
 of the same doctrines," to wit, boycotting. So that Irishmen 
 to-day are worse than the Englishmen of last century. Q.E.D. 
 Finally, the Irish Parliament of last century gave bounties to 
 encourage Irish agriculture against English, even after England 
 had " begun to relax her selfish policy " and was " on the way " 
 to other improvements. They thus reached " about the high- 
 watermark of human folly." So much for the eighteenth century. 
 
 8. On the whole, England did a great deal of good to Ireland 
 by substituting, in the seventeenth century, English tenures for 
 the old Irish tenures. "But it was too late. Many centuries of 
 archaic usages . . . had left the Irish people in a condition of 
 extreme poverty, and of utter helplessness as regarded any power 
 of emerging from that condition."*^ So it is clear that no blame 
 can attach to England. 
 
 Such is the Duke's argument, reduced to its logical essentials, 
 
 P. 195- 
 
 "- P. 194. 
 
 •" 1' 
 
 . 212. 
 
 P. 204. 
 
 '•> P. 216. 
 
 «P. 
 
 236- 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 249 
 
 and relieved of a quantity of irrelevant or self-contradictory 
 rhetoric. I am disposed to pronounce it the most grotesque 
 process of quasi-sociological reasoning in recent literature. The 
 only thing that saves it from being quite ridiculous even in the 
 Duke's pages is his tactic of inserting every now and then a 
 phrase of concession to common sense and common justice. 
 Every little while, when it is necessary to urge that the politics 
 of distant times cannot be adjudged of in terms of the codes of 
 to-day, he will admit that the Irish of the past are not to be so 
 judged any more than the English. But the real object of the 
 concession is always to whitewash England ; and as soon as her 
 defence is thus accomplished the tar-brush is rapidly applied 
 once more to Ireland. Thus the worst crimes of England are 
 made light of on the score that she was no worse than other 
 nations, and did no worse by Ireland than by Scotland and the 
 American Colonies ; while the alleged economic errors of the 
 Irish Parliament of a century ago are denounced through page 
 after page, and branded as "the high-water mark of human folly." 
 In the same way, all Protestant persecution of Irish Catholics is 
 made out an act of purely political self-defence against con- 
 tinental Catholicism ; while the Catholic action, on the other 
 hand, is without any excuse. 
 
 I am in doubt whether it may not be well to leave the Duke's 
 precious argumentation to do its own work, without hampering 
 the process by further explicit corrections of any of his misrepre- 
 sentations. When one reflects, however, that such a book as his 
 can pass current as good reasoning with a powerful party, and 
 can keep for him the status of an eminent politician, it seems 
 as well to supply some of the simple historical knowledge needed 
 for the full comprehension of his untrustworthiness. It may be 
 put, like the gist of his own thesis, in a compressed form. And 
 it may begin by showing that on the Duke's own admission the 
 English kings after Henry II. mig^ht have done much better by 
 Ireland than they did. 
 
 I . The Duke's words on this head are : — 
 
 " Their long, bloody, and exhausting wars to establish a separate 
 kingdom in France were, in the light of our day, not only useless, bu 
 mischievous and even wicked. If they had only spent one-half the 
 energy thus worse than wasted, in completing the civilisation of their 
 own country, and in efifectiially establishing their authority over 
 Ireland as an integral part of their dominions, the gain to themselves, 
 and so far as we can see, to us even now, would have been untold. ' 
 
250 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Of course, after such a passage the Duke had to explain that 
 he meant nothing by it, going on : " But such judgfne?its a?td 
 speculations are wo?-se than idle — unless, indeed, we take them as 
 lessons in the mysterious course of human follies since the world 
 began." And of course no sound Conservative will meddle with 
 such considerations as that. He will indulge in " such judgments 
 and speculations " only by way of showimg what a bad lot the 
 Irish always were. Still, it appears from the Duke's reverie ^ that 
 the blindness and egoism of the English kings wrought evilly for 
 Ireland. And though that is a point hardly worth proving now 
 for its own sake, it is quite relevant as part of the proof to living 
 Englishmen that England in the past has been a "high wall 
 between Ireland and the sun," and that it is their duty ta 
 change the situation. If England was bound to keep Ireland 
 from healthful contact with other States in the past, the more 
 reason why she should do something in a contrary direction 
 now. 
 
 2. The introduction and maintenance of an alien and bitterly 
 hostile force in Ireland was a clear hindrance to any Irish solution 
 of the problem of tribal warfare. Irish potentialities did not end 
 with Brian Boru, whose fate was that of a score of " Teutonic " 
 leaders, from Arminius to Barneveldt. 
 
 3. The formula that " Irishmen made themselves " is simple 
 folly as science, and is worse than folly in an argument which is 
 always showing that the wrong-doing of Englishmen is a matter 
 of " conditions of almost insuperably coercive strength." The 
 Duke's teaching is in effect that while Irishmen are " made [bad] 
 by themselves," Englishmen are made [bad], if at all, by circum- 
 stances over which they have no control. 
 
 4. The Duke's account of the poverty and backwardness of the 
 Irish before the sixteenth century, in respect of the operation of 
 some of their ancient customs, is uncritical and often misleading. 
 When he asserts ^ that Sir John Davies declared Gavelkind to 
 have been a custom which would have been "enough to ruin 
 Hell, if it had been established in the kingdom of Beelzebub," he 
 makes a bad blunder. Davies' phrase referred to the practice 
 of Coyne and Livery — an utterly different thing. Cavelkind 
 wrought no general ruin. There is a great deal of evidence, to 
 
 1 His Grace's remarks here may be regarded as reminiscent of the time 
 when, in regard to the wanton English invasion of Afghanistan, he vigorously 
 attacked the leaders ^of the party with which he now cooperates, and who 
 are now just the politicians they were then. 
 
 2 P. 107. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 25 I 
 
 which the Duke gives no heed, showing that despite the system 
 of Gavelkind and the inter-tribal wars, the condition of the Irish 
 people was not always one of miserable poverty — was often not 
 so miserable as that of English farm labourers has often been in 
 later times, or as that of many tenants of the Duke of Argyll 
 has been in our own generation. Take the account given by 
 the English chronicler Holinshed of the state of Munster before 
 it was depopulated by massacre under Queen Elizabeth : — " The 
 land itself, which before these wars was populous, well inhabited, 
 and rich in all the good blessings of God, being plenteous in 
 corne, full of cattel, well stored with fish and sundrie other good 
 commodities, is now become waste and barren, yielding no fruits, 
 the pastures no cattel, the fields no corne. . . ." Take again the 
 testimony of Spenser : — " Notwithstanding that the same was a 
 most rich and plentifull countrey, full of corne and cattel . . . yet, 
 ere one yeare and a half, they were brought to such wretched- 
 nesse as that any stony heart would have rued the same." Con- 
 cerning the same episode, Sir William Pelham wrote to the 
 Queen, of " the poor people that lived only upon labour and 
 fed by their milch cows."^ 
 
 5. To speak constantly of the barbarism of the Irish, as if 
 other nations were then relatively to them as civilised as we 
 are to-day, is sufficiently disingenuous. The Duke's picture of 
 mediaeval Ireland loses much of its colour if compared with an 
 English picture of English life under Henry II. : — 
 
 " The universal want of respect for human life is shown in all the 
 chronicles of the period. In London, where Jews were frequently 
 massacred by hundreds, the streets were after sunset given to rapine 
 and murder. That which would now be called crime became the 
 favourite pastime of the principal citizens, who would sally forth by 
 night, in bands of a hundred or more, for an attack upon the houses of 
 their neighbours. They killed without mercy every man who came 
 in their way, and vied with each other in their brutahty. . . . False 
 weights, false measures, and false pretences of all kinds were the in- 
 struments of commerce most generally in use. No buyer could trust 
 the word of a seller ; and there was hardly any class in which a man 
 might not with reason suspect that his neighbour intended to rob or 
 even to murder him."- 
 
 If we go back a generation before Henry II., we find the historian 
 declaring that " no more ghastly picture of a nation's misery has 
 
 ^ See the citations in Mr J . A. Fox's Key to the Irish Question, ch. 29. 
 ^ Pike, History of Crime in England, i. 141 -142. 
 
252 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 ever been painted " ^ than that of the horrors of Norman anarchy 
 under Stephen ; and no Irish atrocities of any period can outgo 
 those there described. It never occurs to the Duke of Argyll to 
 mention that Henry II., in a campaign in Wales, caused the eyes 
 of the boys whom he held as hostages to be rooted out, and the 
 ears and noses of the girls to be cut off. Yet historians agree - 
 that Henry's reign " ' initiated the rule of law ' as distinct from the 
 despotism — tempered in the case of his grandfather by routine — 
 of the earlier Norman Kings." "For the fifty years which fol- 
 lowed the Assize of Clarendon [i 166] the trial of accused persons 
 was solely by ordeal or 'judgment of God.'"^ The Brehon 
 law in Ireland was certainly more civilised than that at a much 
 earlier date. And after Henry II. had established eighteen 
 itinerant justices — a measure apparently suggested by his French 
 experience — the corruption among them was so great that he had 
 to reduce the number to five, reserving appeals from their courts 
 to himself in council.'^ 
 
 At a later period Sir John Davies declared that " there is no 
 nation or people under the sun that doth love equal or indifferent 
 justice better than the Irish, or ivill rest better satisfied ivith the 
 execution thereof although it may be against themselves " — this at a 
 period at which the Duke of Argyll represents them as wedded to 
 barbaric custom. If we turn further to the history of the highly 
 civilised Italy of that period, we find a record of ferocity and 
 wickedness which far outgoes the story of Irish barbarism. 
 Relatively to their culture, the Irish were not more but less bloody 
 and turbulent than their contemporaries in England and Europe. 
 During the Wars of the Roses, again, English life indisputably 
 retrograded to a frightful degree. Quantity for quantity of 
 happiness, Ireland was probably not the more miserable country. 
 It is true that the pro-Irish writers who speak of Irish life since 
 Strongbow as an " agony of seven hundred years," set up the 
 same kind of misconception as does the Duke of Argyll, though 
 speaking with a different purpose. His is to depict the Irish 
 people as unparalleled savages and anarchists for their time. 
 Speaking of Shane O'Neill, he observes^ that "it is useless 
 and irrelevant to lay any stress on this man's personal character." 
 All the same, he proceeds to lay great stress on it, noting that 
 Shane was a murderer, bloodthirsty and merciless, false and 
 treacherous, profligate in his life, a drunkard, a tyrant, and 
 barbarous in his manners. Now, Queen Elizabeth was false and 
 
 ^ Green, Short History, p. 98. - Id., p. 106. 
 
 ^ /(/., p. 107. ■• Id., ill. ■' Irish jVatiotta/is///, p. I So. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRLSH HISTORY. 253 
 
 treacherous. If ever a liar lived, she was one. Her minister, 
 Cecil, was another. Her loyal subjects reputed her grossly 
 "profligate" in her life. Her father was "bloodthirsty and 
 merciless, a tyrant, and, in the opinion of many, a superlative 
 murderer ; " and her successor James was offensive " in his 
 manners." The renowned Bruce, flower of Norman chivalry, 
 murdered Comyn at a tryst in a church. The Duke of Argyll 
 overlooks all these items, but makes an inventory of the sins of 
 Shane O'Neill. Let us have all, or let us have an end of ad 
 captajidum characterisations. Telling of Shane O'Neill's death, 
 the Duke skilfully mentions that " he was in true Irish fashion 
 hacked to pieces " — by Scots, be it observed. Shall we also say 
 that Shane would have died in " true English fashion " had the 
 Lord Deputy, Sussex, succeeded in his attempts to poison him ? 
 Shall we say it was in "true English fashion" that St. Leger, 
 Lord President of Munster, caused a pregnant woman to be 
 ripped up, and let his soldiers spear the three babes they found 
 in her?^ Shall we say it was in "true English fashion" that the 
 feet of Archbishop Hurley were roasted before he was sent to 
 the gallows ? Had not his Grace better leave comparisons alone 
 in these matters ? 
 
 6. The duke is at great pains to insist that England was 
 driven to aim at the extirpation of Catholicism in Ireland. 
 " Let it," he modestly demands, " be clearly understood and 
 universally admitted " — the Duke is quite ducally peremptory — 
 " that tiothing that England might really find it needful to do — 
 however severe it might be in itself — in order to keep out her 
 foreign enemies from Ireland, and in order to secure her own 
 dominion in it — can now be considered in any other light than 
 as the necessary steps in a long battle for self-preservation and 
 for life."'^ Yet in the previous chapter he had declared that 
 " the island [of Ireland] ivas practically inaccessible fro?n the 
 European Continent." Then the pretence of keeping out foreign 
 enemies was — "inflated fable"? However that may be, it will 
 be observed that the Duke has categorically laid down an ethical 
 formula which would perfectly justify every action of the Irish 
 political dynamiters in our otvn day. 
 
 7. As regards the confiscations under Elizabeth, under James, 
 under Strafford and under Cromwell, the Duke's defence is so 
 extraordinary that it is difficult to believe that he knows the facts. 
 It was not merely that the estates of vanquished rebels were con- 
 
 ^ Letter from Lord Upper Ossory, in Carte's Life ofOrnioiid, ed. 185 1, v. 279. 
 " Jrisk Nationalism, p. 152. 
 
254 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 fiscated. It was that after all rebellion was at an end, when 
 nominal peace reigned, there went on an incessant process of 
 plunder. As the Unionist Mr I.ecky puts it : — 
 
 " A race of ' discoverers ' were called into existence, who fabricated 
 stories of plots, who scrutinised the titles of Irish chiefs with all the 
 severity of English law, and who, before suborned or intimidated 
 juries, and on the ground of technical flaws, obtained confiscations. 
 Many Irish proprietors were executed on the most frivolous pretexts, 
 and these methods of obtaining confiscations were so systematically 
 and skilfully resorted to, that it soon became evident to chiefs and 
 people that it was the settled policy of the English Government to 
 deprive them of their land." Desmond " would probably never have 
 drawn the sword had he not perceived clearly that his estate was 
 marked out for confiscation." ^ 
 
 The Duke lays great stress on the judgments of Burke in his Tory 
 period. Well, it is Burke in his Tory period who tells how 
 
 "The war of chicane succeeded to the war of arms and of hostile 
 statutes ; and a regular series of operations was carried on, particu- 
 larly from Chichester's time, in the ordinary courts of justice, and by 
 special commissions and inquisitions, first under pretence of tenures, 
 and then of titles in the Crown, for the purpose of the total extirpation 
 of the interests of the natives in their own soil — until this species of 
 subtle ravage being carried to the last excess of oppression and in- 
 solence under Lord Strafford, it kindled the flames of that rebellion 
 which broke out in 1641."'^ 
 
 After the formal settlement made by James, "a perpetual effort was 
 made to deprive the Irish of the residue which remained to them." 
 " The commissioners appointed to distribute the lands scandalously 
 abused their trusts, and by fraud or violence deprived the natives of 
 the possessions the king had reserved for them." •' 
 
 Either the Duke knew these things or he did not. If he did 
 not, he must have handled his sources in an incredibly careless 
 manner. If he knew them, his general vindication of the con- 
 fiscations is a proof of the essential corruption of his ethics. 
 And that seems to be the truth. He e.xcuses, as we have seen, 
 
 ^ History of Ireland in the iSth Century, i. 14, 15, citing Captain Lee's 
 memorial in the Desiderata Curiosa Hihernira, and Ilallam, Const. Hist,, iii. 
 
 370. 
 
 - Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, Bohn ed. of Works, iii. 320-321. 
 
 •' Lecky, i. 27, citing Leiand, ii. 467 ; and Carte's Life of Ormond, i. 24, 
 25 ; and I'rcndergast's Crotnwellian Settlement, pp. 45-47- 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 255 
 
 the rascality of the confiscators with the suggestion that they 
 coveted land " for the purpose of planting a higher civilisation " 
 — a thesis which is probably matchless in the serious literature 
 of the subject. He is great on the " Unseen Foundations of 
 Society," but he will not see the visible ones. He can palliate 
 the most systematic wickedness of rascally English adventurers 
 in Ireland in a past age : it is the struggles of the peasants of 
 to-day to hold to their natal soil that move the ducal indignation. 
 One of his rebuttals of objections to the confiscations deserves 
 to be preserved. It runs ^ : — 
 
 " Considering the further fact that the whole population of Ireland, 
 without exception, have inherited whatever rights they possess in land 
 from either the new race of owners who got the land for the first time, 
 or from the old owners who were not disturbed in their possession, it 
 does seem to be an 'Irish idea' indeed to cottnect any of the evils 
 nvhich now exist or which have arisen withift the last three hundred 
 years with the ' confiscations ' of the sixteenth or the early part of the 
 seventeenth century." 
 
 From this peculiar proposition it logically follows that, in his 
 Grace's opinion, 
 
 {a) All Irish land has been inherited by its existing owners, 
 and none has been bought since the seventeenth century. 
 {b) People who have fio land cannot without absurdity sup- 
 pose that unjust confiscations can have evil results. 
 {c) People who inherit confiscated land cannot conceivably 
 entertain the idea that their ancestors' misdeeds did any 
 harm. 
 {d) People who inherit land that never w\is confiscated cannot 
 rationally suppose that any harm was ever done by 
 confiscating other people's land. 
 {e) The people whose ancestors' land was confiscated cannot 
 
 suppose so either. 
 It certainly cannot be retorted that any of these is an " Irish 
 idea." That expression has always been held to apply to a more 
 exhilarating form of nonsense. But gentlemen who deal in this 
 kind would perhaps do well not to allude to the other. 
 
 8. As regards the penal laws against Catholics, the Duke 
 makes great play with the argument that the principle of 
 punishing and suppressing heresy was always insisted on, and 
 where possible acted on, by the Catholic Church. That is 
 substantially true. The Catholic Church is the great mother of 
 
 ' P. 173. 
 
256 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 persecution. I3ut as between England and Ireland the question 
 was not whether the Pope persecuted but whether Irishmen did. 
 x^nd nothing in history is more certain than the absolute indis- 
 position of Irish Catholics to the religious quarrel w^hich was 
 forced upon them by Protestant England. Even at the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century, there was no positive religious element 
 in the Irish animus against England. The Irish Rebellion of 
 1 64 1 itself was a movement not of fanaticism but of revolt 
 against the crowning wrong in a long series of iniquitous con- 
 fiscations. It was the Puritans of England who, by demanding 
 an absolute extirpation or expatriation of all Irish Catholics, 
 established once for all a distinctly religious resentment in 
 addition to the racial. And to all pretences that the Puritan 
 animus was merely political, we are entitled to give a flat denial. 
 The Puritans persecuted as did the Catholics of the Continent, 
 because they were bigots. In France, before the pacification 
 under Henry IV., the Huguenots were to the full as bent on 
 persecution as the Catholics, nay more so, for they were unani- 
 mous, which the Catholics were not. 
 
 In his struggles to palliate Protestant persecution, the Duke 
 arrives at a significant contradiction. He resorts first to his 
 usual absurd tu quoque. How, he asks,^ 
 
 "How stand the ferocious hatreds and the cruel deeds of clan and 
 intertribal wars as compared with those which have their origin in 
 conviction, however false and misdirected, as to the duty of enforcing 
 relio'ious truth. . . . Which of them stands nearest to the dawn of a 
 rising day ?" 
 
 And he goes on, in confused rhetoric, to decide in favour of 
 fanaticism. As to Cromwell's massacring of unarmed priests, he 
 asks : "is it fair — if we are to be philosophical — is it fair to 
 forget that the very feelings of indignation and of horror with 
 which we now read of Cromwell, in respect to the massacre of 
 rebelUous Catholics [rebellious against Cromwell, himself a 
 rebel] are feelings which have arisen out of the very conquest he 
 effected, and even out of the triumph of the special sect to which 
 he belonged." The first trouble is that Cromwell's " special 
 sect" did not triumph. The next is that the Duke's pecuUar 
 ethic seems to commit him once more to applauding the 
 dynamiters and the moonlighters, since his indignation at them 
 arises out of what they have done. But a few pages on there 
 arises a third and crowning perplexity, for the Duke protests - 
 
 1 P. 193. - P. 211. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 257 
 
 that he regards " the tyranny involved in pure religious persecu- 
 tion as the most wicked of human tempers and the most atrocious 
 of human crimes." What does it all mean? Simply this. The 
 Duke at first decided to brazen out the fanaticism of the 
 persecuting Puritans, and he did so. Then it occurred to him 
 that he might excuse the Puritans as acting on political motives, 
 and brand the Catholic Church as the purely religious persecutor. 
 But he forgot that he had already^ described the Catholic Church 
 as representing, "in a pre-eminent degree, politics in its most 
 fundamental principles," and that he had defended, as above, the 
 spirit of pure religious persecution. So the curse finally flown 
 at Catholicism, as the representative of principled persecution, 
 flies straight to roost on Protestantism. There is no such 
 muddle in contemporary polemics. 
 
 Putting aside the Duke's distressing self-stultifications, one is 
 disposed to ask whether the common run of his party can see 
 no point for discussion in the matter save the ignoble question 
 whether Protestants or Catholics persecuted most? Does it 
 never occur to them, one wonders, to reflect that, ethics apart, 
 the attempt of England to crush Catholicism in Ireland was one 
 of the most monstrous blunders in all political history? The 
 tolerant tactic of Richelieu in France caused Protestantism to 
 lose alike virulence and energy, and to dwindle down to a quiet 
 minority, which it would be still, even if Louis XIV. had not 
 insanely expelled the bulk of it. The persecuting tactic of 
 England in Ireland caused Catholicism there to increase and 
 multiply, till Ireland became one of the typically Catholic 
 countries. The policy is utterly condemned by the result. 
 May there not be as gross a blunder in the present English 
 treatment of the cause of Home Rule ? 
 
 9. The Duke's account of the political crimes of England in 
 the eighteenth century is worthy of his treatment of the con- 
 fiscations of the sixteenth and seventeenth. His remark that 
 " England was not one whit more selfish than all other nations 
 of the same time," if true, would suggest the rejoinder that he 
 should not condemn the Land Leaguers of to-day, in that they 
 are clearly not a whit more selfish than the landlords. But it is 
 not true. It is impossible to point to any other civilised power 
 which in that period (or indeed in any other) deliberately sought 
 to destroy the trade of one of its own provinces in order to please 
 the others. The statement that England " acted on precisely 
 the same policy" towards Scotland and towards her colonies is 
 
 1 P. 1S7. 
 
 R 
 
^3' 
 
 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 ridiculously wrong. As the Duke is perfectly aware, Scotland 
 was admitted to absolute equality of trade with England at the 
 Union ; and the English rulers before the Union never dared 
 attempt the suppression of any export trade in Scotland as they 
 did in Ireland. It is amazing that a Scotch peer should hazard 
 such an assertion. The worst attempts at interference of the 
 English Government in the colonies were trivial compared with 
 those they carried out in Ireland, to the ruin of industry after 
 industry. Beside such indecent special pleading as this, the 
 worst prevarications of Irish patriots are venial. A disputant 
 who describes the wilful destruction of a whole series of Irish 
 industries, in the interests of the traders of England, as " harm- 
 less indeed " compared with the boycotting of opponents in the 
 Ireland of to-day, gives us a decisive test of his ethics. Boycotting 
 is bad enough, whether as practised in Ireland or as practised 
 socially and commercially in England by multitudes of the 
 Duke's political allies ; but it is a transient form of evil com- 
 pared with the purposive turning of a whole nation's path for a 
 whole age into industrial shallows and miseries. 
 
 ID. The Duke's attacks on the Irish Parliament of last century 
 for its protective policy, which he resents so much more than 
 he does the destructive policy of the English government, only 
 serve to put his whole case fatally in the wrong. He is one of 
 those politicians who go far to discredit the principle of Free 
 Trade by a mechanical and unscientific way of stating it. It is 
 really of varying value in varying circumstances. As regards 
 modern England, it is easy to show its benefits. But open- 
 minded economists know very well that Free Trade is no 
 panacea, and that so far from making an end of industrial 
 trouble it facilitates the arrival of certain industrial troubles, and 
 can promote special misery alongside of special gain. It is clear, 
 further, that bounties on the production of food are not the same 
 thing with taxes on the importation of food ; and that in parti- 
 cular cases the bounties may promote well-being while in particular 
 cases the import duties may cause fearful misery. The latter result 
 accrued in England from the Corn Laws, which were strenuously 
 maintained, in its own interest, by the class of whom the Duke of 
 Argyll is the mouthpiece as regards the Irish question. Hence 
 there is a weight of general opinion against the policy of agricul- 
 tural " protection ; " and it is mainly to this general opinion that 
 the Duke appeals when he denounces the "protection" practised 
 by the Irish Parliament last century. That, however, was vastly 
 different alike in intention and in effect from the Tory protection- 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 259 
 
 ism of the next generation in England. The latter aimed above all 
 things at keeping up landlords' rents, in utter disregard of the con- 
 tingent misery inflicted on multitudes of workers in the towns. The 
 Irish Parliament, on the other hand, gave bounties with the ex- 
 press object of making employment for the peasantry, in a country 
 in which pasturage and agriculture were the one great industry. 
 
 No one could ever learn the merits of the case from the Duke's 
 polemic. He quotes Arthur Young as showing that the bounties 
 on native corn caused the turning of good pasture into bad corn- 
 land ; that the corn produced was inferior ; that the premium 
 on land-carriage to Dublin discouraged Irish shipping, and so on. 
 Yet Arthur Young's indictment, when all is said, only amounts 
 to asserting that the bounty system had meant a money loss to 
 Ireland of ^143,510 in seven years} in terms of the old doctrine 
 of balance of trade, whereas the arrangement had secured, by his 
 own avowal, the employment of a " prodigious number of men 
 and horses." - Here we have the side of the matter which Young 
 did not rightly consider, and which the Duke will not consider. 
 
 " All writers," he says, " are agreed that these bounties did produce 
 a great increase of tillage in Ireland — that it displaced more than a 
 corrcspondmg ainount of mucJi more valuable produce^ that it did 
 terribly scourge and exhaust the ground, and that it did tend to 
 stimulate artificially that rapidly swelling population living on the 
 lowest possible diet, which had ultimately to be swept off by famine 
 and emigration."^ 
 
 Let us look at the case for a moment from another side. For 
 a hundred years, Enghsh policy had more or less completely re- 
 stricted all Irish industry, wdth the result that tillage had greatly 
 decreased in favour of pasturage. This meant, production of 
 food for export — either as live or as dead meat — the native 
 demand being checked by the suppression of native industry ; 
 and as pasturage depopulates in comparison with tillage, more 
 and more people were thrown idle. On the other hand, in the 
 absence of tillage, the people were more and more encouraged to 
 cultivate the potato, and so to live at a low standard. For this 
 state of things, obviously, Arthur Young had no cure, as the 
 Duke would have none to-day. Young merely denounced the 
 bad tillage, and exhorted the Irish to stick to pasture and de- 
 
 ^ The Duke (p. 223) puts the matter in this way, whereas a few pages 
 further on he makes Young set the annual loss at ;^53,ooo This is the sum 
 given under one of the items of loss in the seven-years calculation. 
 
 2 r. 227. » Pp. 238-239. 
 
26o THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 population. Now, in an age in which a scientific and compre- 
 hensive solution of the problem was impossible (as it still is, 
 for that matter) the Irish Parliament chose a really remedial 
 course, and the result was a promotion of Irish prosperity,^ 
 Arthur Young notwithstanding. Where a country has suffered 
 artificial suppression of tillage, as Ireland had done through 
 the commercial action of England, it may quite reasonably 
 resort to artificial encouragement of tillage. To say that much 
 of the new tillage was secondrate is nothing. How was it ever 
 to be improved ? Young does not pretend that the soil was bad : 
 rich pasture will mostly make rich arable land. Then only by 
 experiment and competition could the agriculture be made better ; 
 and this is what actually happened. Whereas the average annual 
 export of Irish grain during the year 1771-73 was only 31,423 
 barrels, during the years 1787-89, under the bounties, it rose to 
 517,338 barrels; and during the year ending 25th March 1791, 
 it amounted to 863,047 barrels, despite a great increase in the 
 Irish consumption of barley for brewing and distilling.^ As 
 against such facts, Arthur Young's calculation of money loss has 
 no significance whatever. 
 
 It is quite true that the increase of tillage tended to stimulate 
 population. But it gave both employment and food for the 
 increase, whereas the policy of pasturage had simply made 
 multitudes homeless, forcing them either to emigrate or to sink 
 to lower levels of potato-eating poverty.^ From about the be- 
 ginning of the century, there had been an almost continuous 
 emigration of thousands of people every year. About 1728, at 
 the lowest estimate, there was an exodus of 3000 a year to the 
 American colonies. For the years 1771-73 we have exact figures, 
 the annual average being 9553. Over and above this, there was 
 abundant annual emigration to England ; and it is further 
 established that between 1691 and 1745 a host of Irishmen, 
 sometimes estimated at 450,000, had died in the military 
 service of France* Here then was abundant misery and forced 
 
 1 "We know that almost every species of labour is more than twice as highly 
 rewarded in Ireland as it was about five-and-twenty years ago." Newenham, 
 Inquiry into the progress of Population in Ireland, 1805, p. 143. 
 
 2 Newenham, pp. 48-50. 
 
 ^ "Boulter, Swift, Berkeley, Dobbs, Madden, Prior, and Skelton, all agreed 
 in representing the excessive amount of pasture as a leading cause both of the 
 misery and idleness of the people." (Lecky, Ireland, i. 223.) 
 
 * Newenham, pp. 58-64. Cp. Lecky, i. 245-252. In bad years the rate of 
 emigration from Protestant Ulster had been as high as 12,000, 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRLSH HISTORY. 26 1 
 
 emigration long before the Irish Parliament was re-established. 
 The Parliament sought to mend matters. We know that that 
 is not the Duke of Argyll's way. His prescription is eviction 
 and forced emigration — the eviction of whole communities of 
 healthy rustics to make place either for sheep who shall feed 
 the decadent millions of the towns, or for deer for the hunting of 
 which the plutocrat will pay a monstrous ransom. To him and 
 his class, that spectacle seems to have nothing perturbing or 
 repellent. The Irish Parliament, on the other hand, though 
 certainly not the wisest of witenagemotes, and though perhaps 
 willing to retaliate on England as well as to help Ireland, took 
 the view that the expulsion of thousands of inhabitants every 
 year from a land which could easily maintain them was, in the 
 words of the Unionist Mr Lecky, a loss of " all those classes 
 who were most essential to the development of the nation." ^ 
 That was said of the process by which the " planted " Protestants 
 had been thinned out in the earlier part of the century. On the 
 Duke of Argyll's Free Trade principles, state-aided " plantations " 
 are as bad as any other form of protection ; yet he had eulogised 
 those in question, calling them " successful," though they were 
 later turned to naught in this fashion by the operation of the 
 economic process which he finds so salutary. 
 
 As for the alleged injury to Irish shipping by the bounties, 
 the least independent inquiry would have shown the Duke, what 
 common-sense might have led him to infer, that the Irish carrying 
 trade was mainly in English hands,- Irish shipping having been 
 ruined by the English commercial policy. The premium on land 
 carriage was designed to promote native industry as against 
 English. 
 
 It seems needless to carry any further the process of exposing 
 the " inflated fable " by which the Duke of Argyll seeks to quash 
 the " inflated fable " of Mr Gladstone. I will but group a few 
 more of his worst self-contradictions and mis-statements. 
 
 (a). He states (p. 188) as a proof that the plantation of Ulster 
 was successful, that " to this day it is the most industrious and 
 peaceful part of Ireland." Later (p. 250) he admits that "at one 
 time Protestant Ulster was as bad [in point of misery resulting 
 from sub-letting] as Catholic Connaught." 
 
 (J)). He alleges (p. 253) that "through long centuries the Irish 
 
 ' As cited, i. 245. 
 
 - Tonnage of Irish ships in 1802, as returned to Parliament, 199,320. 
 Tonnage of British ships evtp/oycd in Irish trade at same time, 1,018,081. 
 Newenham, p. 140. 
 
262 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 had neglected what we now call popular education." Considering 
 that the Protestant penal laws had deliberately sought to compass 
 the destruction of all Catholic education, there is something 
 peculiarly odious in the Duke's falsification of the case. In the 
 words of his fellow-Unionist Mr Lecky, " the alternative offered 
 by law to the Catholics was that of absolute and compulsory 
 ignorance or of an education directly subversive of their faith." ^ 
 By way of charging the whole harm on the Catholic creed, the 
 Duke goes on to assert that " the system of Scotch education 
 was purely the product of the Reformation, It did not exist 
 before : it was no part of the Catholic system ; and there were 
 no materials out of which to construct any such system in 
 Ireland. // is absurd to blame the English Government for this 
 defect." Absurd is hardly the word to retort on the Duke here. 
 If he had but consulted the standard modern history of his own 
 country, he would have found that popular education in Scotland 
 stood exceptionally high before the Reformation as well as after.^ 
 
 {c). Of the penal laws the Duke asserts (p. 207) that they 
 " did not prohibit or proscribe Catholic religious worship, pure 
 and simple. On the contrary they expressly permitted, and pro- 
 vided for its lawful celebration by registered Priests, and in 
 registered Chapels." What are the facts? By the Treaty of 
 Limerick it was " expressly stipulated that the oath of allegiance 
 and ' no other ' should be imposed upon the Irish Catholics. 
 Yet ... at a time when not a single act of treason or turbulence 
 was proved against the Catholic priests, the Irish Parliament 
 enacted in 1709 that ... all the registered priests must take the 
 oath of abjuration, under the penalty of banishment for life, and, 
 if they returned, of death." As the abjuration oath was framed 
 so as to be impossible to honest Catholics, the system of registered 
 priesthood was thus annihilated, in breach of a solemn treaty. 
 
 {d). Of the rebellion of i 798, the Duke alleges ^ that "sympathy 
 with the French Revolution in its wildest excesses, and in its 
 fiercest passions, was the heart and soul of that rebellion." I 
 will say of this, once for all, that it is a wild untruth ; that 
 that rebellion was provoked by what Lord Moira called "the 
 most absurd and the most disgusting tyranny that any nation 
 ever groaned under ; " "* and that the excesses and ferocities on 
 
 ^ History of Ireland, i. 149. - Burton, iii. 399-401. '^ P. 254. 
 
 ■* " I have seen," said Moira in the House of Lords, "a country held by 
 military force ; but never did I see, in any conquered country, such a tone of 
 insult as has been adopted by Great Britain towards Ireland." This was in 
 1797. 
 
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON IRISH HISTORY. 26 
 
 O 
 
 the loyalist side, in the suppression of the rebellion, not only far 
 outwent those of the rebels but proved the men responsible to 
 be as bad as the worst of the maddened revolutionists of France. 
 The Duke pronounces Wolfe Tone "a villain of the deepest 
 dye," offering as evidence nothing but furious rant against Tone's 
 " hatreds," and against his taking mass in a Catholic church. 
 Such an estimate may serve us as a final ethical landmark. 
 Wolfe Tone, with plenty of bad faults of character, was as much 
 more civilised a man than the typical Orangemen on the other 
 side as was John Brown than the typical slaveholders of the 
 Southern States. I might add that his " hatreds," in comparison 
 with those of the Duke of Argyll, are, to use a phrase of the 
 latter, " nearer the dawn of a rising day." Hatred of oppression 
 is a healthier thing than hatred of every strenuous attempt to 
 end oppression ; and the fanaticism which in an age of violence 
 contemplated a slaughter of aristocrats as a possible result of 
 a reforming revolution is not at bottom more inhumane than the 
 class fanaticism which to-day fights to maintain for landholders 
 the power to compass by law the annual ejection of hundreds of 
 starving men, women, and children into the highways. 
 
 The Duke ends by quoting and endorsing the words of Burke 
 in the years of his complete capitulation to all the worst ideas of 
 his age : " I must say that all the evils of Ireland originate 
 within itself: but it is the boundless credit which is given to an 
 Irish cabal that produces whatever mischiefs both countries may 
 find in their relation." That, for his Grace, is the end of the 
 whole matter : all Irish nationalist claims, protests, and dis- 
 contents are utterly unreasonable, and are the manufacture of 
 unscrupulous men. All details apart, this judgment is his own 
 sufficient condemnation. When a man gets into the way of 
 regarding any great and continuous national movement, any 
 long and importunate cry of popular complaint, to be absolutely 
 unreasonable and unscrupulous, he is already outside the stand- 
 ing-ground of political science. He may argue and declaim as 
 he pleases; he may set himself to track down the inevitable errors 
 and untruths on the other side, while adding to those which 
 swarm on his own ; he may impute what faults of character he 
 will : all the while he is manifesting a fatal fault on his own part, 
 and his polemics will die with him. It is of no avail to indict 
 whole nations, in the name of neighbour nations, for groundless 
 perversity of complaint : history finally casts all such indictments 
 as rubbish in the void. We know that the ruling Turks con- 
 sider the Armenian Christians a set of turbulent and rascally 
 
264 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 unbelievers ; we know that the French 7ioblesse traced the French 
 Revolution, both at the time and afterwards, altogether to the 
 wicked teachings of democratic philosophers ; and we know what 
 we think of the judicial weight and intelligence of these estimates. 
 It is the memory of the wiser and better actions in the Duke's 
 career that withholds me from putting his treatment of the Irish 
 problem on a level with these. He has but followed in the path 
 of Burke, who, after making a maxim by his refusal to frame an 
 indictment against a whole nation, came to owe his highest 
 prestige to the doing of that very thing. The Duke will win no 
 such success ; and we can the better afford to pass on him the 
 lighter blame. 
 
VII. 
 
 MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 
 
 Dr Goldwin Smith is a writer of a type supposed to be 
 peculiarly English, and believed to be much esteemed in 
 England on that score. His manner is one much cultivated in 
 the universities, and by writers who come thence : the manner of 
 self-restraint and judicial curtness, the air of understating a case 
 and putting an irresistible truth more in sorrow than in anger, 
 with perfect recognition of the faults on both sides. As manners 
 go, it is a good manner, and the impression it makes is a testi- 
 mony to the general respect for accuracy and soHdity of judg- 
 ment. In no nation, however, are accuracy and solidity of 
 judgment common, and it is therefore possible to get credit 
 for them at times, and with many people, by carefully cultivating 
 the semblance without attaining the substance. Of the many 
 generalisations as to national characteristics, perhaps the least 
 fallacious are those which deal with foibles, airs, the lighter 
 qualities which come of institutions and way of life ; and it may 
 be said that one of the foibles of Englishmen is the parade of 
 dispassionateness and reason in matters of passion and prejudice. 
 They love to think they are above the French mania for rhetoric, 
 the hysteria of the Irish, the methodism of the Germans, the 
 Russity of the Russians, whatever it may be. And though the 
 bias be a good one, the success hitherto attained in suiting the 
 action to the word is not dazzling. A certain irrelation of 
 mental states and literary manner is still the rule, especially in 
 political writing ; and men are found getting much credit for 
 hard-headedness on the strength of being merely hard-mouthed. 
 In view of the status given to some writers, it begins to be 
 (Questionable, if it ever was otherwise, whether the English are 
 any less led by rhetoric than the French, or by prejudice than 
 the Irish ; whether their average reasoning is anything but 
 rhetoric and prejudice with a difference. 
 
 Nobody's writing raises the question more pressingly than that 
 of Dr Goldwin Smith. There are other political writers whose 
 
 265 
 
2 66 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 tone and tactic come near enough to his ; but none covers 
 so many fields, and few can rival him in the variety of their 
 doctrine. His recent volume of collected Essays on Questioiis 
 of the Day deals with the " social problem " ; the " political 
 crisis in England " ; the special questions which mainly con- 
 stitute that crisis, to wit, Disestablishment and Home Rule ; 
 " the Empire " ; woman suffrage ; the Jewish question ; and 
 protection in Canada and the United States — notable questions 
 all. To discuss them all soberly and wisely would be to render 
 a service to the commonweal. There is a place for the hard- 
 headed critic of new ideals and new schemes, if he can only be 
 hard-headed enough. The weak side of reform is the optimism 
 of reformers ; and though hope is a prime factor in progress 
 it need not be any the less efficient for being controlled by 
 criticism, as a steam engine by its governor. But a close study 
 soon reveals in Dr Smith's criticism the very defect of balance 
 which he imputes more or less all round. His relation to the 
 things he antagonises is at best a checking of the puerile by the 
 puelline. As we go through his essays one by one, and note the 
 method and the conclusions, it comes home to us that instead of 
 a scientific tester of theories and theses we are listening to a 
 gentleman in a state of covert irritation against things in general, 
 with whom an instinct of opposition does duty for a body of 
 principles. Let anyone make the study, as an exercise in 
 analysis and appreciation, taking Dr Smith's essays in suc- 
 cession. It will be found that he is the bubble of his moods, 
 as our ancestors would say. In every essay he reaches a con- 
 clusion which in some other he disclaims, unless it be that in 
 one essay he combines the condemnation of his doctrine with the 
 statement of it. There are men from whom you can get a denial 
 of any doctrine you please, by simply putting it to them a little 
 baldly or a little aggressively. Such men are supposed to speak 
 commonly — and indeed they often do — with an Irish accent, 
 which recalls to their opponents an Irish anecdote. But it will 
 be found that there is no more perfect specimen of the type in 
 the literary world than Mr Goldwin Smith, whose main inspiration 
 in his recent discussion of the Irish question is his sense of the 
 radical wrongness of the Irish character ; and who yet figured for 
 the last generation of Englishmen as the vindicator of the Irish 
 character against just such charges as he now heaps upon it. 
 He is the weathercock of criticism : the opposite-of-all-things to 
 all men. When optimists are about, he becomes strongly appre- 
 ciative of the evil side of nature ; when Socialists denounce the 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITIl's POLEMIC. 267 
 
 evils of society, he discovers in society a wonderfully happy 
 arrangement. In the opening essay of the present volume, 
 entitled " Social and Industrial Revolution," these two positions 
 are taken up alternately. We set out with a black picture of the 
 constitution of the universe, by way of setting us against the idea 
 that mankind will ever be able to attain general felicity. " Can 
 anything," asks our philosopher, " be less like perfect justice than 
 the distribution of lots amongst living creatures of every kind 
 through the whole scale ? " and the thesis is elaborated in a 
 forcible manner, man and his methods being shown to share the 
 universal imperfection. " This is economically, as well as physi- 
 cally, an imperfect world." But after a little, when we have to 
 deal with Socialist protests against the social system, the case 
 alters, and the Socialist is exhorted to " consider how, by the 
 operation of economic law, under the system of industrial liberty, 
 the single penny is distributed among all industries justly, ' even 
 to the estimation of a hair,' " and then to " ask himself whether 
 his government, or his group of governments, is likely to do 
 better than nature ! " " Nature," be it observed — not the estab- 
 lished systems of men. This from an author who on another 
 pretext will rail with anybody against the appeal to " Nature." 
 So with every other issue in turn. When we are considering Mr 
 Gladstone, he becomes the leader of the nation to perdition, 
 though we are to "be just and remember the share which the 
 Conservative party, as well as the Gladstonian party, had in 
 bringing all this disaster and disgrace on the country." But 
 again, the methods of democracy are at the bottom of it all. 
 Parliamentary verbosity is a terrible thing ; but on the other 
 hand, we learn that " by the closure " the House of Commons 
 is " reduced to a voting machine of which the caucus turns the 
 crank. Its members . . . regard themselves as delegates of the 
 caucus, pledged to do its bidding, and, if their conscience rebels, 
 to resign." Then a little further on we learn that, " incapable of 
 self-guidance, the masses blindly follow a leader." So that the 
 Commons are under the caucus, and the caucus under the 
 electors, and the electors under Mr Gladstone and his colleagues ; 
 and yet Mr Gladstone and his colleagues are in the clutch of the 
 caucus. So was it when Mr Gladstone led ; now that he no 
 longer leads, Dr Smith will have no difficulty on his method in 
 making out an equivalent case. 
 
 By the law of his temperament, Mr Goldwin Smith must again 
 proceed to confute himself when he deals with Woman Suffrage. 
 When he is contemplating the political crisis over Home Rule, 
 
2 68 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 he finds all political virtue gone out of the British male. But 
 inasmuch as women claim to have a hand in politics, it must be 
 shown that the male is after all doing very well. In the battle of 
 life men learn "caution, prudence, the necessity of compromise, 
 the limitations of their will " ; and they further " feel as a sex the 
 full measure of responsibility in public action." This after all 
 the disaster and disgrace and degeneration represented by the 
 caucus and Home Rule and Mr Gladstone. Finally the British 
 male must be rehabilitated once more by way of disparaging the 
 Irish. In the essay on the " English " Crisis, which is just the 
 Irish Crisis, Dr Smith, as we have seen, makes out that English 
 politicians have in the mass become worthless. In dealing 
 separately with the Irish question, he must needs put back 
 English politicians on their pedestal, in the customary English 
 manner, in order to belittle the Irish. The gist of Dr Smith's 
 argument against Home Rule is just an attempt to show that the 
 Irish character is extremely bad while the English character is 
 good. England is going to ruin politically, as England ; but 
 as the contrary of Ireland she becomes the perfection of political 
 development. The English are " incapable of self-guidance " — 
 until it is necessary to show that the Irish are. Dr Smith ought 
 really to be thankful to the advocates of Home Rule and Woman 
 Suffrage : they enable him to feel he has something in common 
 with his fellow-countrymen. 
 
 Here then we are dealing with a literary character in itself 
 incurably vacillating, w-eakly capricious, and untrustworthy, but 
 skilled to put on airs of sangfroid and " Saxon " superiority. It 
 might be thought that such a writer would discredit at once 
 himself and his cause ; but, as we have seen, the trouble is that 
 there are thousands of Englishmen who want just such a mouth- 
 piece ; and such minds, even if so disposed, are mostly too dull 
 to do for themselves the work of analysis which reduces the 
 special pleading to its elements of random prejudice and self- 
 contradiction. Hence Dr Smith has been able to do more 
 harm than any recent writer save one by his profoundly malicious 
 treatment of the Irish question. His tone being measured, his 
 knowledge wide, and his detail judgments often just, credit for 
 justice and moderation is given to his whole argument, when 
 what he has done is merely to tithe the mint and anise and 
 cumin of minor issues in order to pervert the weightier matters 
 of justice, mercy, and truth. It is his tendency to do this to 
 some extent in all he writes ; but in the case of Ireland his 
 animus is at its worst and his chances of doing harm greatest. 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITH's POLEMIC. 269 
 
 As has been said, it is part of the method of quasi-moderation 
 to make a show of impartiahty. This Dr Smith does with great 
 address, as thus: 
 
 " Irish history is a piteous tale. But there is no sailing up the 
 stream of time. We must deal with things as they are now, not im- 
 molate present pohcy to the evil memories of the past. Detestable is 
 tJie art of t lie demagogue wJio rakes up those //leiuories to obtain for his 
 Schemes from passion the support which reason and patriotism would 
 not give. No living man is now responsible for anything done seven 
 centuries or a single century ago. He who persists in accusing England 
 of cruelty to Ireland, when the last three or four generations of English- 
 men have been as much as possible the reverse of cruel, only gives 
 way to his temper and darkens counsel " (p. 266). 
 
 Here, if we had not read the preceding pages, the tone of 
 judicial calm, or at least of earnest wisdom, would seem perfect. 
 We cannot accuse Dr Smith of overtly losing his temper. He 
 is sufficiently English in respect that, whereas a " typical " Irish- , 
 man perverts truth in a passion, our Saxon does it with delibera- 
 tion and strategy. A cold baseness and a ratiocinative iniquity v 
 are certainly more "Saxon" than "Celtic," to use for the nonce 
 the old terminology of English prejudice, adopted by Dr Smith. 
 But the sequel shows the amount of sincerity in Dr Smith's 
 detestation of the art of the demagogue. Will it be believed 
 that after the exordium above quoted he proceeds just to rake 
 up all that has ever been said against so-called Celts by non- 
 Celts in all ages, from Paul to Mommsen, in order to prejudice 
 the Irish claim for Home Rule, and " to obtain for his schemes 
 from passion the support which reason would not give " ? Of all 
 who have judged the Irish question by the test of Celtophobia, 
 no one has raked together more systematically than Dr Smith 
 the aspersions which, in the miserable conflict of racial egoisms 
 and stupidities, have fallen to the share of "the Celts." Dr 
 Smith begins by citing Dr Mommsen as having pronounced the 
 race " politically worthless," but affects to put his testimony aside, 
 because " Mommsen has Bismarckian iron in his blood, as he v 
 has the tramp of the German armies in his style." Well, the 
 " Bismarckian iron " of Mommsen is a metal of which there 
 has never been any lack in any nation. Any word monger, 
 scholar or otherwise, himself incapable of action, can pose as 
 a man of iron by extolling Ca;sarism and affecting contempt 
 for whole races. We have had plenty of that in our own tongue 
 from Carlyle, and we are beginning to estimate how much of 
 
270 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 coherent character there was behind it all. We have had more 
 of it from the Saxon Lord Salisbury, whom the actual Bismarck 
 — or, as some say, a diplomatist of Italy — has summed up as 
 " a lath painted to look like iron." And doubtless Caesar and 
 Severus had in their antechambers no lack of Mommsens and 
 Salisburys, acclaiming them in their march towards the morass in 
 which imperial Rome and ancient civilisation ended. 
 
 But Dr Smith, scrupulously waving aside the too Bismarckian 
 Mommsen, goes on to quote the characteristic passage in which 
 Bishop Lightfoot, who " has no Bismarckian iron in his blood," 
 comments on Paul's "Ye foolish Galatians," which for the 
 Bishop's purpose becomes "Ye senseless Gauls." The Bishop 
 supports the inspired epithet by the testimony of the Romans, 
 who found the Gauls impetuous in onset, but not enduring ; and 
 of Caesar, for whom the Gaulish inconstancy was " the great diffi- 
 culty with which he had to contend." For Dr Smith all this is 
 now valid testimony against the modern Irish. Any stick will 
 do. Paul himself had become a violent Christist after violently 
 persecuting the Christists ; but when his converts in Galatia 
 accepted "another gospel" he was hotly indignant; just as he 
 was indignant with the Corinthians, where also he " laid a founda- 
 tion and another builded thereon." For the men to whom he 
 prescribed the rule of love, and to whom he appealed " by the 
 meekness and gentleness of Christ," Paul when crossed had 
 always in pickle the rod of his vituperation ; and his com- 
 mentators of the apostolic succession see in his endless see-saw 
 of benediction and bitterness, humility and protestation, a 
 stability of character which gives irresistible weight to all his 
 estimates of his fellow-creatures. Oddly enough, however, Dr 
 Lightfoot finds that a condemnation which fell equally on 
 Galatians and Corinthians — the latter living in a Roman colony 
 — proves only the fickleness of the Gauls. All the while, there 
 is nothing whatever to show that the converts in Galatia were 
 Gauls, any more than that the first converts in Rome were of 
 Italian birth. The presumption is that many of them, like so 
 many of the first Christists every\\;here, were Jews, members of 
 the " stiff-necked race," which was also the race of perpetual 
 " backsliding " and seeking after "strange Gods." Such are the 
 data on which some men found their generalisations of national 
 character. Dr Lightfoot's jurisprudence is buttressed by Dr 
 Smith's ; deep answering unto deep. 
 
 The testimony of Cassar and the Romans is of similar value. 
 To be eager in onset and quick to disperse is the characteristic 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITFI S POLEMIC. 27 1 
 
 of all uncivilised races in war in all ages. It was the noted 
 characteristic of the Scotch Highlanders of last century, whose 
 children and grandchildren, when disciplined, have made the 
 most stedfast soldiers in the world, even in the judgment of 
 Mr Kipling, who holds that "Celtic" practices are unalterable 
 through posterity when the Celts happen to have been born in 
 Ireland. It was the characteristic of the Germans of the Roman 
 period ^ as well as of the Celts. And to revolt against an alien 
 rule at every opportunity is simply the course which has been 
 taken by high-spirited peoples of all races in all ages — Greeks, 
 Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Swiss, and Scotch. The Austrians 
 notoriously found " difficulty " in dealing with the Italians, as 
 did Edward Urst with the Scotch ; but it is not now common 
 to argue that the fact served to prove the fatal instability of the 
 insurgent race. It is left for an obscurantist bishop, whitewashing 
 Paul, and an English publicist, blackening Home Rule, to turn 
 such facts to such account. 
 
 When Dr Smith proceeds to rely on his own sociological 
 resources, however, he leaves the Bishop far in the rear. To 
 simplify his task, he makes the ingenuous assumption that it is in 
 the nature of Celts to make no progress of their own accord, while 
 all other Aryan races are self-civilising. 
 
 "In France the Celt underwent Roman and afterwards Frankish 
 training. What he would have been without that training, Brittany, 
 amiable but thriftless, slatternly, priest-ridden, saiut-uorbhipping, 
 legendary, is left to tell. We know how even the Celt who had 
 undergone Roman and Frankish training behaved in the French 
 Revolution." 
 
 Thus " all occasions do inform against " the Celt. The Irish- 
 man, albeit his country has been again and again overrun and 
 " settled " by Saxons, is a Ctlt ; the French Celt, after his 
 country has been overrun and subjugated by Franks and other 
 Teutons, remains a Celt ; but England, after being overrun and 
 subjugated by those same French Celts, remains Saxon. When 
 the merits of France have to be explained by your Celtophobe, 
 he decides, with Carlyle, that the Teutonic Franks who con- 
 quered the Celt have " ridden him ever since." When the 
 question turns on French misdeeds, it is the Celthood of the 
 Celt that explains. Thus do the complexities of human things 
 become clear to the British Unionist, strong in that primeval 
 
 ^ Cp, Tacitus, De moribits Cer manor uiit, cc. i, 4, 6, 7. 
 
272 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 virtue which an impartial Providence alloted to his race along 
 with its no less signal endowment of critical insight. 
 
 Of the value of the racial a priori test, as against the other 
 apriorism of the detestable demagogue, Dr Smith is quite satisfied. 
 
 " Between the general InHuence of race and that of the local circum- 
 stances of the Irish Celt, a character was formed which is as distinct 
 as that of any individual man, and which it would be as absurd to 
 overlook or to pretend not to see in dealing with the race as it would 
 be to overlook or to pretend not to see personal character in dealing 
 with a man." 
 
 Taking this view, Dr Smith will of course not object to my 
 prefacing an examination of his anti-Celtic argument with an 
 account of his own character. But may not the principle be 
 carried too far? Because I find Dr Smith loading the dice of 
 argument and reasoning alternately like an Old Bailey lawyer and 
 a thimblerigger at a fair, am I entitled to say he would cheat at 
 cards or in trade, or personate another citizen at the ballot-box ? 
 Because he is the shuttlecock of his varying moods, perpetually 
 confuting himself, saying " no " to every doctrine in turn, though 
 the last itself consists in saying "no" to the one before, am I 
 entitled to call him a lunatic, and advise his being put under 
 restraint ? Because his views on political problems are finally 
 chaotic and nugatory, am I entitled to demand that he be dis- 
 franchised ? Am I even justified in denying that he says many 
 true and reasonable things, because I find him uttering systematic 
 falsity and folly about what he calls " the Celt " ? 
 
 If we were to judge him by one page of his essay on "The 
 Irish Question " it would certainly be difficult to speak too 
 strongly against his literary character. The passage I refer to 
 begins thus : — 
 
 "That the Irish Celt has gifts and graces, or that under a good 
 master or commander he makes a good worker or soldier, nobody 
 who knows anything of him denies. Nobody who knows how Irish 
 emigrants have been assisted by their kinsmen in America will deny 
 that the Irishman has strong domestic affections and a generous 
 heart. But nobody who is not angling for his vote will affirm that in 
 Cork, in Liverpool or Glasgow, in New York or the Australian 
 colonies, or anywhere, he has as yet become a good citizen under free 
 institutions. Nobody who is not angling for his vote will affirm that 
 he is by nature law-abiding, or that when his passions are excited, 
 whether his victims be his agrarian enemies in Ireland or the hapless 
 negroes in New York, he is not capable of dreadful crimes. The 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 273 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, when he takes to rioting may be brutal : in the Lord 
 George Gordon riots (!) he was brutal enough ; but he does not card 
 or hough, nor does he cut off the udders of kine. The Phoenix Park 
 murders were a Celtic, not an Anglo-Saxon deed." 
 
 It is something that Dr Smith should admit that "the Irish 
 Celt " can work and fight well under a good master or leader, 
 which is the most that can be said for nine-tenths of mankind, 
 Saxons included. Other Saxons are industrious in asserting that 
 " the Celt " is a sluggard ; Dr Smith certifies that they know 
 nothing about him. It is something that he grants to the Celt 
 strong domestic affections, which some people deny to the 
 thousands of Saxons who let their fathers and mothers die in the 
 poorhouse. But it is difficult to see the point of the generalisa- 
 tion that Irishmen do not make good citizens in Cork, Liverpool, 
 Glasgow, New York, or Australia. Are the other inhabitants of 
 Liverpool, Glasgow, New York, and Australia predominantly 
 good citizens, and are the Irish never so ? Is there proportion- 
 ally more wickedness in Cork than in — say — Newcastle? Were 
 the members of the Tammany ring all Irish ? And why is it 
 now only the Irish Celt who is to prove the cursedness of 
 Celticity ? What now of the Galatians and the French ? And 
 what now of that demoralisation which at other times Dr Smith 
 depicts in the entire political life of England ? 
 
 Testimony is a ticklish thing : we see how Dr Smith testifies 
 with the fear of God avowedly before his eyes ; but there 
 happens to be abundant testimony to the good citizenship of 
 multitudes of Irishmen in the United States and in Australia. 
 Such testimony was borne by Mill, who was on the whole a better, 
 a wiser, and a more truth-loving man than Dr Goldwin Smith, 
 and who passed this judgment on the kind of talk which fills so 
 many of Dr Smith's pages : 
 
 " Of all vulgar modes of escapiftg from the cofisideratton of the effect 
 of social and moral i>ifliiences on the hioiian fin'fid, the most vulgar is 
 that of attributing the diversities of conduct attd character to inherent 
 natural differetices." 
 
 That the Irish in America are not on the whole represented in 
 politics by their best men is true. So much was admitted by Mr 
 McGuirt, a sufficiently sentimental Irish Catholic who wrote on 
 The Irish ifi America a generation ago. But it is no more and 
 no less true than that the native-born Americans are not repre- 
 sented on the whole by their best men. And what of that? 
 Has not Dr Smith just shown us that Mr Gladstone has brought 
 
 s 
 
2 74 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 " ruin and disgrace " on England, and that the Conservative party 
 had their share in the performance ? 
 
 As to capacity for crime, does Dr Smith propose to show that 
 " Saxons " are devoid of it ? Does he mean to say that there is 
 more crime per head in Ireland than in England ? Does he 
 suggest that the worst slave-torturers of the Southern States forty 
 or fifty years ago were Irish ? Does he pretend that the lynchers 
 and torturers of negroes in the Southern States in our own day 
 are mostly Irish ? If he does not imply these things, his argu- 
 ment is quackery: if he does imply it, what shall be the comment? 
 
 " The Anglo-Saxon, when he takes to rioting " is brutal. Most 
 peoples are. That " he " does not often hough or mutilate kine 
 is a negative circumstance due to the fact that " his " brutality is 
 evoked in other ways than those which evoke the brutality of 
 Irish peasants. But "he" used to set dogs to worry rats and 
 bait bulls, and cocks to hack each other to death, for his Saxon 
 sport ; " he " still does strange things with the aid of Her 
 Majesty's buckhounds ; and if " he " were waging an agrarian 
 war with grasping landlords, " he " would probably hough his 
 landlord's cattle too. The English and the Lowland Scotch of 
 past centuries did that sort of thing with small scruple ; and they 
 were " Saxon " all. 
 
 And why put the Phoenix Park murders and cattle-hacking on 
 one side, with only the Gordon riots on the other ? Why not 
 give a glance at the literature of Saxon wife-beating ? And why 
 not take a "Saxon" political murder? Such a murder was the 
 murder of Archbishop Sharp by Scotch Presbyterians, two hundred 
 years ago ; and there is preserved for the sickening of civilised 
 men a contemporary record of the beastliness of that business, 
 which makes the Protestants concerned, in contrast with the later 
 assassins of Phoenix Park, somewhat as the satyr to Hyperion in 
 the scale of ferocity. In the sixteenth century, again, when the 
 Lowland Scotch had been driven to the extremity of fury by the 
 oppression of the English, and were gradually driving them out 
 by the help of French allies, Scotch men-at-arms, we are told> 
 used to buy from those French (Celtic !) allies their English 
 prisoners, in order to tie them to a stake and tilt at them with 
 lances till they were bled to death. It was Saxon to Saxon then, 
 presumably : the " Celts " seem to have turned their backs. It 
 was Saxons, too, and Saxons whom Dr Smith particularises as the 
 flower of the race, who in New England two hundred years ago 
 bored through the tongues of Quakers with a red hot iron. And 
 it is not recorded that they were Irish officers and soldiers who 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 275 
 
 in recent years smoked natives to death — men, women, and 
 children — in caves in South Africa. 
 
 When a writer who deprecates the raking up of old abomina- 
 tions proceeds to make his own case by just such means, he 
 forces these odious comparisons. In a rational discussion of 
 the Home Rule question they would never arise; but we are 
 dealing with disputants who mask with judicial airs a sophisti- 
 cated malice filtered down from ages of crass race hatred. The 
 way to compare English and Irish brutality is to go back to the 
 story of English doings in Ireland, when the conquerors stood by . 
 and saw the surviving vanquished devouring the corpses of their 
 kindred in the green ditches, where they crawled trembling on 
 hands and knees like dying beasts. Detestable indeed is the 
 " art " of the English publicist who, claiming for the nonce to 
 put out of sight all the crimes of his race towards Ireland, yet 
 heaps up every evil thing and evil word that stands written 
 against the race which his own has for centuries deliberately 
 brutalised. 
 
 There is an extravagance of partisanship in Mr Goldwin 
 Smith's ethnology which would discredit him among educated 
 men in any country save Unionist England. His indictment 
 becomes a farce. 
 
 " Lists are given," he observes, " of Irish statesmen and commanders, 
 such as Canning, Castlereagh, Clare, Wellington, Wellesley, Grattan, 
 Plunket. the two Lawrences, Napier, Roberts, and Wolseley. These 
 are Saxon, not Celtic Irish. Even Parnell and Butt before him were 
 of that intrusive race ivhich it was the object of their nwvcnient to 
 expel. Of Parnell, Mr T. P. O'Conner tells us that his manner was 
 Saxon in its reserve and his speech was still more Saxon in its rigidity. 
 Parnell probably owed largely to the cool tenacity of his Saxon 
 character his despotic ascendancy over his train. There has been 
 no Celtic leader of eminence except 0"Connell, who was an agitator, 
 not a statesman, hurke had in him a Celtic strain which showed 
 itself in his more declamatory and passionate moods. That the Celt is 
 politically -weak, ten centuries of wail without achievement are surely 
 proof enouj^h.'" 
 
 The conclusion, be it noted, is that the Irish ought not to 
 have Home Rule now because they did not get it before ; and 
 the premiss is that the strongest element in Irish character is 
 English. Thus " the Celt " gets the blame for failing in the 
 demand which has been pushed by " Saxon, not Celtic Irish." 
 It was not Saxon weakness that caused the failure of achievement, 
 
^ 
 
 276 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 albeit it was Saxons who failed. For the rest, the men of Norman 
 descent, who in France at revolution times are " Celts," are in 
 England "Saxon." If we were to cite Scotch-Celtic statesmen 
 and commanders, such as Sir Colin Campbell and Sir John 
 Macdonald, we should doubtless be told that these are " Scotch, 
 not Irish Celts " ; and if we made a list of French commanders 
 from Conde to Macmahon, we should be told that they were 
 " Frankish, not Irish Celts." Roberts, a Welshman by paternal 
 name, becomes Saxon for Dr Smith's purposes. Parnell, as 
 Home Ruler, is a liar and a trickster ; as " born leader of 
 men " he is Saxon and superior. Burke is to count to Saxondom 
 in respect of what was best in him, since so many Saxons have 
 sat at his feet ; but his vices are to count to his Celticity ; while 
 Burke of Phoenix Park goes wholly to the Celtic side of the 
 account. There is a certain felicity in the way in which Dr 
 Smith tempers his black art by burlesque. But the farce is 
 fitful, and shades into the other thing. He goes on : 
 
 " In the North of Ireland are prosperous industry and commerce with 
 Protesfant liberty of conscience. In the South are unthrift and poverty 
 under the dominion of the priest. The political institutions and the 
 relation to Great Britain are exactly the same i/i both cases ; it seems 
 to follow that the character of the people is notP 
 
 It would be difficult to beat that " are exactly the same " in 
 modern sociology. Catholic Ireland has lain till within living 
 memory under a penal law unmatched for wickedness in 
 European history ; her commerce was for generations systemati- 
 cally stifled by England ; her land laws have for centuries 
 represented the high-water mark of iniquitous absurdity. But 
 inasmuch as the agricultural south is thus less prosperous than 
 Protestant Belfast, the difference must be due to race character, 
 " Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of 
 political influences — ! " 
 
 In Protestant Belfast, bigotry reaches the worst developments 
 now to be seen in northern Europe. Certain groups of streets 
 are allotted to Catholics, and if a Catholic dare to take a house 
 in a Protestant street he is "fired out." If the dominion of the 
 Irish presbyter is less deadly to culture and judgment than that 
 of the Irish priest, it is not to be proved by the tone of society, 
 political or ecclesiastical. And there is no other. In France, 
 again, somehow we have Celtic " thrift " under the auspices of 
 the priest ; and in the Scotch Highlands we have Celtic poverty 
 under the auspices of the " Free " Church. But these intractable 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 277 
 
 quantities are left out of Dr Smith's equation. Heads, the Saxon 
 wins ; tails, the Celt loses. The sauce for the goose must not be 
 served with the gander. Dr Smith proves the hereditary vicious- 
 ness of the Irish by recalling the fashion of the feudal retainers 
 of the earl-chieftains of three hundred years ago. " The historic 
 thread if slight, is 7iot invisible, which cotmects these Bosses ivith the 
 Bosses of New York." But we must not look for threads from 
 the English of those times to Lord SaHsbury and Dr Goldwin 
 Smith. " Detestable is the art of the demagogue ! " And as for 
 the fact that the old Bosses were as often as not " Saxon, not 
 Celtic Irish," why, the answer is that " when, l>y the degeneration 
 of the Anglo-Norman lords, the chief was blended with the feudal 
 baron, the result seems to have been a mixture of the evils of 
 both systems." Only when the Anglo-Norman degenerated, of 
 course, did his system evolve evils. As for the domestic 
 affections of the Celt, it could doubtless be shown (were not Dr 
 Smith merciful) that these are Saxon survivals. 
 
 Attention tends to flag over Dr Smith's demonstration, even 
 when stimulated by a sense of its burlesque. He covers most of 
 the ground. " Cromwell proclaimed to the Catholics liberty of 
 private conscience " ; and as for the suppression of Catholic 
 worship, when we consider it as Protestants " we may be rather 
 disposed to wink at this departure from religious liberty." We 
 may. We may also be disposed to put our tongue in our cheek, 
 surmising that Dr Smith has done it to begin with. Even when 
 denouncing the penal code as "cruel and hateful," he puts a 
 Saxon saving clause. 
 
 " Mark, however, that the penal code was not intended, like the re- 
 ligious codes of Roman Catholic countries and the Inquisition, to 
 rack conscience and compel apostasy, but to keep the Celts disarmed, 
 socially and politically as well as physically, and prevent them from 
 repeating, as, if the power had reverted to their hatids, they would have 
 repeated, the acts of TyrconnePs Parliament. Remember too what 
 was being done in countries where Roman Catholicism reigned. . . . 
 Forty years after this the Roman Catholic Prince Bishop of Salzburg 
 expelled the whole Protestant population from his dominions." 
 
 Even in Saxon Salzburg ! But " mark," as Dr Smith says, the 
 ethic of the comparison. The pretence that laws putting a 
 premium on apostasy were not meant to compel apostasy, may 
 be left to dispose of itself: the practical issue is as to whether 
 the penal code was an act of self-defence. That Catholics in 
 those days would have persecuted if they had the power may be 
 
278 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 taken for granted ; but that is not the question. The question 
 is whether freedom of worship in Ireland would have given them 
 the power ; and the only way of pretending to show that it 
 would is to point to " Tyrconnel's Parliament." The very phrase 
 is a fraud. Tyrconnel had power simply in virtue of the Catholi- 
 cism of King James, under whom there was Catholic tyranny 
 in England at the same time. In his customary manner, Dr 
 Smith writes that "Ireland was put into the hands of Tyrconnel, 
 who, though a reckless ruffian, was accepted as the leader of the 
 Catholic Celts at the time." And what about the Catholic 
 Saxons ? Tyrconnel was appointed by James : would Catholic 
 Saxons, as a rule, in such a case have rejected him ? Tyrconnel 
 zvas himself a " Saxon " according to Dr Smith's own precious 
 classification. That is to say, he was a Talbot, of Norman 
 descent. And did the High Church Saxons, save at the crisis 
 of 1688, ever hesitate at a pinch to accept as their leader either 
 a reckless ruffian or a reckless adventurer, a Strafford or a 
 Bolingbroke ? Be that as it may, the pretence that a penal law 
 was needed under William and the Georges to prevent Irish 
 Catholics from reinstating " the Parliament of Tyrconnel " is an 
 absurd perversion of the plainest historical fact. One wearies 
 of an argument that grows devoid of even decent plausibility, 
 keeping up the manner of restraint and judicial summary over 
 a piece of the worst special pleading on record. 
 
 Even Dr Smith flags in his course. After his incomparable 
 defence of the penal code he is fain to admit the indefensible- 
 ness of the commercial code, the English refusal of commercial 
 union. Of course nobody is to blame, "//"the sons could ever 
 deserve to suffer for the sins of the fathers, the England of our 
 generation would deserve to suffer for this misdeed." But it is 
 only Irish Celts who deserve to suffer for the faults of their 
 ancestors, even unto the generation of the Galatians. " Com- 
 merce has served civilisation well ; but there is also a heavy 
 account against her.^' So we can justly blame " commerce," and 
 trust that " she " at least will get her deserts at the day of judg- 
 ment — with " the Celt." 
 
 For the rest, the refusal of union to Ireland in the early part of 
 the eighteenth century was a " calamitous blunder." How far 
 Dr Smith would allow this concession to countervail the deep 
 damnation of "the Celt," it is impossible to say; but such gleams 
 of concession leads us to the point which we have been with- 
 holding in order to meet Mr Smith's case on its merits — the 
 I)oint, namely, of his former and very different teaching on the 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 279 
 
 Irish question. For it is the fact, as aforesaid, that the Mr 
 Goldwin Smith of a generation ago figured as the rational 
 defender of Irish character against Enghsh prejudice, and, what 
 is more, the propounder of a scheme for the solution of the Irish 
 problem by a political arrangement not wholly alien to the ideal 
 of Home Rule. It is instructive, as to his own character, to 
 contrast some of those early deliverances with the language held 
 by Dr Smith to-day. It is no discredit to any man to have 
 honestly and consciously changed his opinions. We have all 
 been forced to it at times : indeed it is reasonable to suspect 
 that a man who denies having changed in any particular between 
 youth and age has simply been idea-blind. But a man should 
 show argumentative cause for his changes if he is to have us 
 believe that he has changed for any better reason than temper 
 and constitutional instability. And Dr Smith shows no cause 
 whatever for his resort to the views, so irrational in themselves, 
 above discussed, after having held the following : — 
 
 " If they [the Irish people] are wanting in industry, in regard for the 
 rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full 
 explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent 
 depravity or even any inherent weakness. They have never had the 
 advantage of the training through which other nations have passed in 
 their gradual rise from barbarism to civilisation. The progress of the 
 Irish people was arrested at an almost primitive stage, and a series of 
 calamities following close upon each other has prevented it from ever 
 fairly resuming its course. The pressure of overwhelming misery has 
 now been relieved ; government has become mild and just ; the 
 civilising agency of education has been introduced ; the upper classes 
 are rapidly returning to their duty, and the natural effect is at once 
 seen in the improved character of the people. . . . There are still 
 speakers and writers who seem to think that the Irish are in- 
 curably vicious, because the accumulated effects of so many unhappy 
 centuries cannot be removed at once by a wave of the legislator's 
 wand. Some still believe, or affect to believe, that the very air of the 
 island has in it something destructive of the characters and under- 
 standings of all who breathe it. These absurdities are of old standing." ^ 
 
 Here is an explanation of things Irish which Dr Smith's recent 
 diatribe in no way sets aside, which in fact it absolutely ignores. 
 He seems to have forgotten that such opinions were ever held by 
 anybody, not to say by himself. As utterly does he seem to 
 have forgotten how he once wrote that Ireland is " the standing 
 
 ' Irish History and Irish Character, by (Joklwin Smith, 1861, pp. 194-195. 
 
2 8o TIIK SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 confutation of our boasted statesmanship and of our boasted love 
 of justice," ^ and added : " / have myself sought afui found in the 
 study of Irish history the explanatio7i of the paradox that a people 
 with so 7nany gifts, so a?niable, and naturally so submissive to 
 rulers" [in spite of the Gauls and the Galatians !] '■'■ a7id evejy- 
 ivhere but i?i their own country industrious, are in their own 
 country bywords of idleness, lawlessness, disaffectiofi, a?id agrarian 
 crime." 
 
 In those days, he could see that the Irish Rebellion of 1641 
 " was simply a natural episode in the Irish land question." He 
 could then be wroth that " contempt for humanity and sympathy 
 with cruelty is cultivated by feebleness as a proof of vigour." 
 He could see with Adam Smith that Ireland was cursed by 
 " an aristocracy the most odious of all " ; and he could admit 
 that " Ireland was ruled, and her policy kept in union with that 
 of England, by systematic corruption " ; though to-day he is 
 satisfied to quote Dr Dunbar Ingram as unanswerable on the 
 subject of the Union, without troubling to meet or mention the 
 answer of Mr Gladstone. When in that forgotten frame of mind, 
 too, Dr Smith could tell the story of 1798 with much force. 
 His present curt account is to the effect that the practices of the 
 Protestants " were flogging, pitch-capping, picketing, and half- 
 hanging, as those of the Catholics were shooting, carding, and 
 houghing." A generation ago he told how the Protestants com- 
 mitted rape and murder ; and instead of using terms now unin- 
 telligible he told how Catholic Celtic victims were made to stand 
 on one foot on a pointed stake, and had their scalps torn from 
 their heads, by chivalrous Saxons. He told, too, how when Sir 
 Edward Crosbie was hanged, " the remains of the murdered 
 gentleman were abused in a manner shocking to humanity." He 
 told among other things how a Protestant yeoman shot an already 
 wounded boy dead in his mother's arms. To-day he is con- 
 cerned to tell at length only how Whiteboys committed their 
 murders. "It is useless to recount the infernal history of 1798, 
 the passions of which only the vilest demagoguism would wish, 
 for political purposes, to revive." If there is a worse dema- 
 goguism anywhere than Dr Smith's own, it is at least denied the 
 advantages of literary status, the use of the reviews, and the 
 services of leading publishers. The tactic of denouncing the 
 revival of all memories telling in favour of Ireland and against 
 England, in the very act of parading all memories which seem to 
 tell the other way, is surely a shade more execrable than the 
 
 ^ Second Lecture on Pitt, in 77inr English Statesyiicn, ed. 1867, p. 93. 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 25 1 
 
 unsophisticated malice of ignorance. Dr Smith can forget any- 
 thing save his acquired prejudice. He claims, as we have seen, 
 that for generations " Englishmen " — all of them — have felt 
 nothing but kindness towards Irishmen, himself giving the lie 
 the while to his assertion. He flatly denies that " the Irish since 
 the Union have been subject to social disparagement in the 
 slightest degree " ; as if every middle-aged man could not still 
 remember how the insult " No Irish need apply " was once a 
 common stipulation in advertisements. He does but prove 
 either the worthlessness of his memory or the worthlessness of 
 his testimony. '^ 
 
 And this is the gist of Dr Goldwin Smith's service to the cause 
 of "Unionism." His recent essay is a party pamphlet of the C^ 
 worst description, all the worst for its drab style and mock dis- 
 passionateness. If he had desired to discuss the issue without 
 reviving old passions and prejudices, he could have quietly left 
 them alone, and argued the point of Home Rule on the grounds 
 of the existing situation. But it is death to " Unionism " to do 
 that. It must stand on race prejudice or disappear. If we take 
 Ireland as a moderately civilised nation, backward but improvable, 
 priest-ridden but capable of superseding priest-rule like France and 
 Italy, the argument against Home Rule becomes only an argu- 
 mentative protest against incurring the risks of federalism, as seen 
 in the history of the United States and of dual monarchies ; and 
 such deprecation of risk, reasonable ten years ago, is now com- 
 pletely overruled by the proved incapacity of most Englishmen to 
 treat Ireland as an integral part of the State, as well as by the i 
 proved determination of most Irishmen to accept only a federal 
 union. The political situation has made a federal union inevit- 
 able, whatever its risks. Accordingly a so-called " Unionism " 
 which repudiates federation even while pronouncing it the only 
 logical course, must needs rally to its support the forces of heredi- 
 tary passion and ill-will. Thus we have the spectacle of a party 
 calling itself Unionist while urging a propaganda of pure inter- - 
 racial repulsion. There is not one unional argument in the 
 Unionist repertory. The overt motive of the teachers of the 
 party is bitter aversion to the race whom they propose to keep in 
 a desperate union with England on English terms ; while on the 
 contrary the first effective approach towards Irish reconciliation 
 with Englishmen has been set up by the policy which the 
 Unionists denounce. 
 
 And here again, as it happens, Dr vSmith is blindly denouncing 
 a principle which his own earlier writing went far to ratify. " Tlie 
 
282 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Fenian movement," he \vrote in 1868, "is not religious, not 
 radically economical (though no doubt it has in it a socialistic 
 
 v V element), but national, and the remedy for it must he 07ie which 
 cures tiational discontent. This is the great truth which the 
 English people have to lay to heart." ^ Still more explicitly 
 he went on : — " The chief malady of Ireland, as I am convinced, 
 is the void created in the national heart by the want of any in- 
 stitutions commanding the reverence, love, or confidence of the 
 nation ; and the only cure for the malady, I repeat, is such a 
 measure of decentralisation as will satisfy the national aspira- 
 tions. The difficulty, of course, is to frame such a measure 
 without an actual dissolution of the Union."- In the spirit of 
 that doctrine he went on to propose " an occasional session of 
 the Imperial Parliament in Dublin," a solution which might per- 
 haps have been effective then, but which is plainly inadequate 
 now. Yet, in face of the tenser strain, he not only does not 
 offer a fresh suggestion : he does not so much as suggest that 
 any accommodation is needed. The answer to the caveat 
 against dissolving " the Union " is that to dissolve the Union 
 is not to end union, but rather to open the way for a Union 
 v' politically and morally worthy of the name. But the Dr Smith 
 of to-day will not even approach that issue in a rational spirit. 
 
 So far is Dr Smith from discussing the matter in the spirit of 
 rational statesmanship that he again and again drops covert 
 
 \ ' menaces of civil war. It is typical of his latter-day personality 
 that, while loudly denouncing the politics of revolution or 
 violence as against Socialists, he is ready to threaten both in 
 the most reckless fashion as against Home Rulers. In his 
 more restrained style, he contrives to bluster as virulently as 
 
 ~x any Ulsterman, telling how in the siege of Derry "the stronger 
 
 ^ race showed in extremity a force which in extremity it may show 
 again," and finally declaring that " Civil war is a dreadful thing ; 
 but there are things even more dreadful than civil war. Submis- 
 sion to the dismemberment of the nation by the sinister machina- 
 tions of a morally insane ambition, would in the end work more 
 havoc than the civil sword." Well, some of us have been saying 
 for years that there is a species of moral insanity apparent in the 
 intellectual development of Mr Goldwin Smith.'' Three years 
 
 ' The Irish Question. Three Letters. By Goldwin Smith, 1S68, p. 5. 
 
 '' Id., p. 16. 
 
 •"• It may be not uninstructive to recall to Dr Goldwin Smith's present allies 
 one of the many criticisms of their ideals which used to appear in l^hr. Bystander, 
 Toronto, edited by him. Here is a passage dating from 1S81 : — " Our free ex- 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITh's POLEMIC. 283 
 
 ago, he came forward with an essay on the thesis that criminals 
 are "moral agnostics," in the course of which he alleged that 
 the murderer Palmer (who was really a zealous religionist) had 
 no religious belief, and proceeded to suggest that unbelief was 
 correlative with criminality. And this moral controversialist now 
 sets up as the censor of the pohtical morality of half the nation, 
 and proposes to get up a civil war rather than submit to the 
 decision of the majority to remake the constitution. The malice 
 of a neurotic invalid, with more than his mental vacillation, is the 
 moral stock-in-trade of l)r Smith. 
 
 In one of the few paragraphs in which, after exhausting his gall 
 and bitterness on the character of the Celt, he comes to the 
 
 pression of opinion as to the intense vulgarity of the view of life presented in 
 Endyniion seems to startle some Endymionists in England. Journalism on 
 this side of the Atlantic, at all events, may speak without reserve of matters 
 on the other side. . . . Was criticism needless? Is nobody to protest when 
 young men setting out in public life are taught that they owe nothing to their 
 country or to their kind, that all they have to do is to get as much of gilded 
 luxury as they can, and that so long as they get a full measure, it signifies 
 nothing what course they take ? This is the moral oi Etidymion, which, from 
 beginning to end, never hints at a public motive, never suggests any law of 
 action but success, or makes success consist in anything but money, titles, the 
 'society of people of rank, gorgeous furniture, and sumptuous dinners. Again, 
 is the lurid light which this piece of oblique autobiography throws on the 
 history of England and Europe during the last forty years to be utterly dis- 
 regarded ? England has poured out blood and money ; she has incurred 
 military disgrace, mingled with dishonour, in South Africa and the East ; 
 she has had her best Governments overthrown by intrigue ; she has had her 
 representation degraded, and her Parliamentary institutions placed in jeopardy ; 
 Turkey has been plunged into a hideous war with Russia . . . ; Afghans 
 defending their country have been slaughtered, and their women and children 
 driven out to die upon the hills— all this, not for any of those great objects 
 which make up to nations for temporary loss and suffering, not even to fulfil 
 the vision of a grand and soaring though perhaps irregular ambition, but to 
 realise a day-dream of Houndsditch." To-day Dr Smith is the champion and 
 mouthpiece of the very men and types whom he thus bitterly aspersed in 1881. 
 In the tragical farce of human tergiversation, it will not be easy to find a more 
 dramatic antithesis. The student, relaxing from rigour into compassion, can 
 but speculate on the physiological secret of this writer's long series of declara- 
 tions for and against a hundred things in turn, consistent only in the shrill 
 note of the constrained temperament. What is certain is that two such literary 
 careers as his and Mr Froude's, to say nothing of Carlyle's and Ruskin's, go 
 a long way to make shipwreck of the conventional English discrimination 
 between "Saxon" and " Celtic " characteristics. The reaction of Taine was 
 decent and dignified in comparison ; and the temper of Renan simply out of 
 the comparison altogether. 
 
284 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 point, he argues that there can be no confederation save in " a 
 large group of tolerably equal States." Who is to decide it? 
 The question is open ; and it would take a good deal of political 
 sagacity to settle it in advance. And what of political sagacity 
 has been shown by Dr Smith? He has stultified himself on 
 every great topic he ever discussed. In this one book he destroys 
 in each essay some of the positions he takes up in others. In 
 writing on Pitt thirty years ago, he declared that " the income tax 
 is a tax which ought to be resorted to only in time of war or in 
 some national emergency which excites the national spirit as 
 much as war. It is only when the national spirit is so excited 
 that there is a chance of true returns." Will any one now dispute 
 that these are the words of a bumptious blunderer? In the same 
 lecture he wrote, apropos of the founding of Botany Bay : " Leave 
 nature to herself and she will choose the germs of new nations 
 well. . . . Careful in selecting the right seed for a plant, she is 
 not careless in selecting the right colonists. Left to herself she 
 selects the flower of English 7Vorth, the founders of New England.'''' 
 Whether it is " nature " or " man " that floods the United States 
 with " Irish Celts," is left to our speculation. There are doubt- 
 less still some people in England who will not admit that this is 
 the sociology of fools. But is there any country save England 
 where such folly would not destroy a writer's status as a sociolo- 
 gist? It was the counterbalancing effect of saner sayings that 
 made some of us continue to credit Dr Smith with some intel- 
 lectual and ethical influence for good ; but he has by this time 
 spent his credit. Once he denounced the men who made the 
 aggrandisement of England their sole political motive. Now he 
 hunts in couples with them, preaching, to use his own former 
 words, " under the thin disguise of rhetoric, doctrines which in 
 their naked form could be avowed only in the cavern of a bandit 
 or on the deck of a buccaneer." And this weathercock of per- 
 versity presumes to threaten civil war to those who contemn his 
 doctrine as they contemn his character. 
 
 Enough of the personality of a writer who is in all sobriety 
 and sadness to be classed, after many years of not undistinguished 
 mental activity, as a mental invalid. But the discussion of the 
 questions he raises, and of this of " The Saxon and the Celt " in 
 particular, ought not to be made to stand or fall with that of his 
 personality. To settle it merely by exposing his characteristics 
 would be to imitate his own evil ways. If the foregoing criticism 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITIi's POLEMIC. 285 
 
 suggests or makes out anything, it is that the judging of the 
 Home Rule question in terms of Enghsh hatred of Irishmen as a 
 race is a course unworthy of rational men. It simply gives full 
 and final justification for the cherishing of the deepest Irish 
 hatred of Englishmen. The analysis of racial character is a 
 sufficiently complex and precarious business for a scientific and 
 impartial sociologist ; it is the idlest of occupations for men pro- 
 fessing to advise how their neighbours should vote on a political 
 issue. There are Liberals who explain Mr Chamberlain in terms 
 of the civic character of Birmingham, and Tories who detect in 
 Mr Gladstone a sinister blend of Liverpool and Oxford, giving 
 Scotland credit for his " speculativeness." When it comes to 
 this ethnology of the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Philippians, 
 and the Colossians, we had better go back to the principles 
 of the " doctrinaires " of an earlier generation, who would have 
 pronounced Mr Goldwin Smith's essay an embodiment of the 
 philosophy of the taproom in the language of the schools. That 
 Irishmen in the mass have grave faults is just as certain as that 
 Englishmen in the mass have grave faults. Let there be no 
 dispute about that. But to say that Irishmen are not fit for 
 self-rule is only to reduce all political argument to absurdity ; 
 for it is part of the case to make out that Mr Gladstone and 
 those who follow him are unfit to judge rightly for themselves 
 in politics ; and it is plainly impossible to deprive Gladstonians 
 of the power of acting on their political opinions. Therefore 
 it is neither here nor there to say that Irishmen are not to 
 be trusted with the machinery of government. That is just what 
 all Liberals and Tories say of each other. 
 
 Every single judgment passed by Englishmen on Irishmen as 
 such, recoils directly or indirectly on themselves. The charge 
 of quarrelsomeness is made by Englishmen who have quarrelled 
 bitterly with their own former colleagues. Even if Irishmen be 
 specially turbulent, misgovernment has made them so. If they are 
 relatively backward in culture, it has been mostly since England 
 interfered with them. If they are anti-English, what is gained 
 by Englishmen being in turn anti-Irish, now as before? The one 
 aversion justifies the other. The risks of federalism, again, are 
 an argument against federalism if there be an alternative of 
 amicable progress under the old system ; but who can now say 
 there is any such alternative ? " A federation of England, 
 Scotland, Wales, and Ireland," says I)r Smith, "would be an 
 everlasting cabal of the three lesser States against the greater." 
 Then what is going on at present ? The cabal is even now 
 
286 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 insoluble just because all of the lesser States alike in an increas- 
 ing degree desire Home Rule ; and it cannot conceivably end 
 till they get Home Rule. Given federalism, there is no ground 
 left for caballing — no ground, that is, on which the lesser States 
 can possibly unite. If need be, the question whether England 
 should have one or several Parliaments within the federation can 
 be discussed. Dr Smith devotes thirty pages to gossip against 
 Gauls, Galatians, and Celts, in the manner of the man in the 
 smoking-room, and glances in a sentence at the real political 
 problem. 
 
 "To a moral certainty," he declares, "Ireland would become a 
 thorn in the side of Great Britain. To sustain herself against her 
 powerful neighbour, she would attach herself to some foreign enemy 
 of England, as the tribes attached themselves to Spain in the sixteenth 
 century, and as Scotla7td attached herself to France before the Union. 
 This Great Britain could not and would not endure. Ireland would 
 be reconquered and the circle of woes would revolve again." 
 
 " To sustain herself against her powerful neighbour ! " There is 
 one ground on which candid men will admit a possibility of 
 Ireland becoming hostile to the other parts of the State, and 
 that ground is religion. If she should remain devoutly Catholic, 
 she might conceivably sympathise with a Catholic enemy of 
 England. Let us give the possibility its full force. But on the 
 face of the case, that very possibility has double force in the 
 case of an Ireland strugghng for Home Rule ; and what are 
 Unionists doing to lessen the risk ? They are simply in- 
 tensifying it. The one way to make Ireland less fanatically 
 Catholic is to remove the motive which keeps her Catholicism 
 identified with her national aspirations. In the long indictment 
 of English stupidity and wickedness in the matter of Ireland, the 
 five main political counts are ( i ) that Ireland was first of all driven 
 into Papalism when she was on the whole non-Papal, and when 
 the Pope had injured her by giving away her primitive autonomy, 
 such as it was ; (2) that Ireland was kept Papal by specifically 
 Protestant oppression ; (3) that after she had been Anglicised 
 under Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell, the new English element 
 itself was rapidly driven into hatred of England by insane in- 
 justice ; (4) that she was so continuously misgoverned that, in 
 the words of the Dr Smith of the last generation, " the Protestant 
 Republicans of the North of Ireland — they, mind, not the 
 Catholics," were driven into revolt; and (5) that she is kept 
 intensely Catholic by the unreasoned policy which is partly based 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITIl's POLEMIC, 287 
 
 on hatred of her CathoHcism. The last is the point of present 
 importance. So long as Ireland is kept fighting for national 
 existence, so long will she be bound to the priesthood which 
 sanctions her struggle. England shrieks against the power of 
 the priest ; but it is England that makes the power of the priest. 
 Let Ireland be left to develop politically in her own way, and 
 there will inevitably arise in Ireland an anti-clerical Liberalism 
 such as has arisen in Italy, vSpain, France, and Belgium. The 
 reason why there is yet no such Liberalism in Ireland is precisely 
 the adherence of the priesthood to Nationalism — a state of things 
 which never arose in the popular movements of France, Italy, 
 and Spain. The Redmondite party is at present in a sense anti- 
 clerical ; but its anti-clericalism is bound to be pragmatic and 
 ineffective so long as the priesthood are just as Nationalist as 
 itself. It dares not attack the Church as Church even if it were 
 so disposed, which it is not. But under Home Rule the Church 
 can no longer be identified with the people ; anti-clericalism will 
 begin to mean rationalism ; politics will become secularised ; and 
 Ireland will cease to be an Ultramontane community in politics 
 even as France and Belgium and Italy have ceased to be, and as 
 Spain is ceasing to be. Thus the main conceivable risk of 
 Anglo-Irish federation begins to lessen from the very moment 
 of federation. 
 
 Nor is there any other way in which Ireland can be made less 
 Catholic. Protestantism is of no avail : it is simply the stone in 
 the wound. The one permanently effectual foe to Papalism, as. 
 the history of France and the history of Germany have shown,, 
 is rationalism. The Catholic Church is now very much more 
 powerful politically in Germany than in France, in Belgium, or 
 in Italy, because rationalism in Germany is academic and non- 
 political, and the composite State is fatally committed to defend- 
 ing the Catholic Church everywhere from popular criticism. 
 Only in Germany can a layman be sent to jail for a jest against 
 the Virgin Mary on the lecture platform or at a cafe table, or 
 an editor for a printed jest at the Holy Coat of Treves. The 
 Catholic Church is a united and clearly defined force in the 
 Empire, fighting for her own hand : she waxes, while Pro- 
 testantism wanes ; and nothing but a straightforward application 
 of rationalism to the whole range of life will ever stay her advance 
 and her tyranny. In the so-called Catholic countries, on the 
 contrary, she is powerful in virtue only of the surviving super- 
 stition of the most uneducated, and she is jealously resisted by 
 the growing mass of instructed men. The rationalists of Italy 
 
2S8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 have set up the statue of Giordano Bruno on the very ground 
 where the Papacy burned him ; and the Papacy can but im- 
 potently curse the defiant deed. 
 
 Given the conditions of severance between priesthood and 
 people, then, the severance wiU arise in Ireland as elsewhere : 
 even Dr Smith can see that. The Church cannot continue to 
 be the church of the tenant-farmers as such under Home Rule, 
 whether or not the State becomes the landlord. Nationalists in 
 their own Parliament must inevitably divide into parties : and she 
 cannot be the ally of both. What then becomes of the danger 
 of Ireland as a whole siding with a Catholic enemy of England ? 
 On what ground will she have to " sustain herself against her 
 powerful neighbour " ? If Ireland needs to do it, still more will 
 Scotland, which is smaller than Ireland, and Wales most of all. 
 The Unionist argument will then run that England, Ireland, 
 and Wales cannot endure Home Rule for Scotland, and will 
 have eventually to " reconquer " Scotland ; and so with Wales. 
 But Dr Smith has also thought fit to say, as we saw, that on 
 the contrary Scotland, Ireland, and Wales will be in an everlast- 
 ing cabal against E^igla^id under a federal system. These two 
 mutually destroying propositions occur within two leaves of each 
 other. Thus does prejudice reason. 
 
 May we not now reasonably argue — even those of us who 
 twelve years ago feared that Britanno-Irish federation would open 
 the way to such a civil war as that of the United States — may we 
 not now rather reason that a small federation of unequal States, 
 such as England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, is after all less 
 open to such a risk than a large federation of " tolerably equal " 
 States? A federation of the latter sort evolved the American 
 Civil War. Could ours do worse? If it be so plain — and it is 
 indeed plain — that Irish secession from the federal union would 
 instantly lay Ireland open to being " reconquered," with no hope 
 of another emancipation, is not that a very good reason for ex- 
 pecting that Ireland will not attempt to secede? And is there 
 any surer way of giving England her reasonable predominance in 
 the affairs of these islands than to create a federation in which 
 the representatives of the federated States will vote, not on each 
 other's domestic claims, but only on their joint international and 
 fiscal policy ? That England is at present constantly out-voted is 
 the complaint of the very men who propose to maintain the con- 
 ditions under which she is bound to be out-voted. 
 
 It is sad and strange that men should thus perpetually frustrate 
 their own aims as well as their own good by sheer stress of sub- 
 
MR GOLUWIN smith's POLEMIC. 2 89 
 
 rational animosity. The present state of continuous fever and 
 friction is the very surest means of preventing England and 
 Ireland alike from getting the good which Ireland might other- 
 wise attain to ; and the malady reaches wherever the English- 
 speaking race groups itself in communities. By keeping Ireland 
 abject, we insure a perpetual efflux of inferior Irish. They swarm 
 in American politics ; and Americans rage vainly. They endow 
 the Home Rule agitation, and will continue to endow it. Possess- 
 ing qualities which as clearly admit of high culture as do those 
 of the French, they are to-day in a relatively lower stage of 
 culture than the Irishmen of last century. Belfast is no longer 
 capable of republicanism and rationalism ; Dublin is no longer 
 noticeably literary. The recent efforts to revive culture can 
 come to little while the country is convulsed by political struggle. 
 The swarming peasantry — who will never learn conjugal prudence 
 till better economic conditions outweigh in influence the counsels 
 of the priest — flock in shiploads to America, where for a genera- 
 tion they serve to illustrate the crudity of the civilisation that is 
 made by suddenly plunging primitive ignorance into undreamt-of 
 material well-being. And so it comes that we get no more 
 Goldsmiths, no more Burkes, no more Sheridans, no more 
 Moores even ; although even now the race shows here and 
 there its old qualities of relative freshness of feeling and way- 
 ward genius. 
 
 " The race," we finally say, whatever " the race " may really be ; 
 the race not in the sense of the descendants of the Gauls and the 
 Galatians, or of the Danes and the Normans and the English, 
 but in the sense of a changing complex of gifts and defects 
 wrought out of so many generations of certain conditions — 
 even bad conditions. If grimy English factory towns can yield 
 elements of good, may not Irish hovels do as much? Corsica 
 has yielded only one Napoleon, and England only one Shak- 
 spere ; but they count for a good deal when they come. And 
 Napoleon, was he not an " Italian Celt " ; and Shakspere, is it 
 not surmised that he came of a blend of Wales with Warwick- 
 shire? The crucibles of race are deeper than our alchemy. If 
 rich England yields herds of fools and praters as well as strong 
 men and sane thinkers, may not Ireland yield clear heads as well 
 as hot ones? Dr Smith finds that we have no trustworthy 
 English politicians : why then so much fear of Irish ? Tennyson 
 talked of " the blind hysterics of the Celt " ; and all the while he 
 made his literary effect mainly in virtue of his own hysterics, 
 which may or may not have been Saxon. We do not all esteem 
 
 T 
 
290 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 him as he esteemed himself; and perhaps these pages may partly 
 show that Englishmen in general would be the better of a little 
 self-criticism. 
 
 The truest, tersest, and most scientific sentence that has been 
 said in this century on the Irish question is the utterance not of 
 an English publicist or politician but of an Irish landlord, whose 
 written remains were published two years ago. He was not a 
 highly-cultured man : he was — be it duly recorded by a rationalist 
 — a warmly evangelical Christian. But he had an excellent 
 heart, and if the heart be only good enough, it can at times 
 wonderfully enlighten the head. John Hamilton of St Ernan's, 
 Donegal, met with Irish peasants of both rehgions, did well by 
 all, and was well done-by by all, as he shows in many a simply 
 touching tale. And though, dying before the Home Rule issue 
 took its present shape, he was no Home Ruler, he gave this 
 judgment on the Irish question : 
 
 '■''Ireland has to attain an adult state, which was certainly retarded 
 in bygone years by misgovernment and oppression. A great deal of 
 what is attributed to the character of ?-ace is really due to national 
 youth, and time with national advancement will, with the blessing of 
 God, show it." 1 
 
 The " blessing of God " is on the side of the nation which knows 
 how to bless itself, even as it is on the side of the strongest 
 battalions. The man who wrote that sentence, with its simple 
 wisdom and its touch of childishness, could never have been a 
 " Unionist." Unionism cannot afford to admit that the faults of 
 the Irish are the faults of national youth artificially prolonged. 
 
 We have only to go back a generation to find Lowland Scotch- 
 men charging Scotch Celts with all the vices which the Goldwin 
 Smiths find in those of Ireland. Hill Burton's History of Scot- 
 land is flawed and stained throughout by irrational imputations 
 on the Celts who gave their name to his own race, imputations 
 which point to their own answer in his own pages. The simple 
 secret of it all is the evil instinct which makes the prosperous 
 impute others' unprosperity to a vice of character, carrying into 
 class relations and race relations the baseness which makes them 
 shun their unlucky acquaintances, especially those they have 
 helped to ruin. Burton like other Scotch publicists was faced 
 by the trouble of Highland poverty, and like the most vulgar 
 ignoramus he framed a simple theory to the effect that Highland 
 
 ^ Sixty i'ears' Experience as a>i Iris/i Landlord, 1S94, ]). 327. 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITHS POLEMIC. 29 1 
 
 crofters were poor by reason of their hereditary character. All 
 the while he inadvertently made it clear that the Gaelic-speaking 
 people of the Hebrides, where the poverty is as serious as any- 
 where, are mostly of Scandinavian descent ; and that Lowland 
 settlers have utterly failed to make a living at all where native 
 Hebrideans have managed to get along. Himself ostentatiously 
 sceptical about the Druids, he accepted the worthless traditional 
 terminology of Celt and Saxon without the least critical scruple. 
 All the while he was falling, in his own history, into hundreds of 
 inaccuracies, as if to show how slovenly a scholarly "Teuton" 
 can be. To-day, we hear much less of the vices of Celticity in 
 Scotland, seeing that the Scotch Celt visibly holds his own with 
 the Lowlander wherever he meets him on equal terms, and 
 supplies the most energetic element in half the colonies. It is 
 the Irishman who is to-day under the insensate ban of " British " 
 prejudice ; and we are now told that the Scotch Highlander is a 
 wholly different type from the Irish peasant. So much change 
 can one generation work in the babble of the partisan. A differ- 
 ence of character there certainly is between the average High- 
 lander of to-day and the average Irish tenant-farmer. But what 
 made the difference ? Last century the ancestors of both were 
 classed together as irreclaimable : last generation Burton found 
 the Highlander's case hopeless. Prejudice can never stop to 
 analyse and think : the Saxon's temper is as near his tongue as 
 the Irish Celt's, albeit the Saxon tongue is slower in its motion. 
 The fact is that the Highlanders of to-day are going through 
 something like the intellectual evolution that the Lowlanders 
 began at the Reformation. They are developing all the narrow 
 and obstinate bigotry which for two hundred years distinguished 
 the " Saxon " Scotch of the south. It is they who now reinforce 
 the party of Calvinistic orthodoxy in the Presbyterian churches 
 and repel all rational criticism. They show the brute strength 
 of purpose that goes with brute strength of body. They recruit 
 the towns, and tend to keep the level of town culture fixed at the 
 ecclesiastical orthodoxy of the past. In fine, their faults are 
 just the faults of previous generations of the other "race" in the 
 same environment. Absit omen ! 
 
 If racial prejudice can but unseal its eyes, it may read in every 
 history the lesson that not national characteristics but national 
 conditions determine a nation's well-being. Given different con- 
 ditions, causes of one class may work to wholly different ends. 
 Englishmen are wont to point to intestine discord as the mark 
 of racial failure or unfitness. As if any nation ever sank lower 
 
292 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 from intestine discord than did England in the Wars of the 
 Roses, or Germany in the Thirty Years' \\'ar ! Dr Smith decides 
 that "there is nothing in the Irish horoscope at the time of the 
 Norman conquest or in any subsequent manifestations to lead us 
 to assume that Irish history without British connexion would 
 have been bright and happy." "Horoscope" is the right word 
 for the purpose of such a sage, in such an undertaking. But it 
 would tax even his gift of sophistry to point to promise of bright 
 happiness in the English horoscope of the tenth century, when 
 the Saxons, turned religious cowards, basely bought off the 
 Danes ; or in the twelfth century, under King Stephen, or under 
 King John, or under Richard the Second, or under either 
 Charles or James the Second. With Dr Smith, the wish is 
 father to the thought. And so, while deciding on one page that 
 a federated Ireland is sure still to be united against England, he 
 decides on another that the Irish on the contrary will fight 
 disastrously among themselves. "The torch of intestine dis- 
 cord " will be " re-kindled once more." So that while the rule of 
 the priest is "sinister," the dissension which will destroy it 
 is sinister all the same. Sinister in a sense it may be ; but 
 Englishmen ought surely to be the last men to impute intestine 
 discord to other nations as a crime. It is the strict scientific 
 truth that all political progress is made by intestine discord, in 
 England as everywhere else ; and when Dr Smith is not bent on 
 making a pariah of the Celt he is lugubrious over the intestine 
 discords of his own race, which point to a social readjustment 
 more profound than the world has ever yet seen. For Irishmen 
 as for Frenchmen and Germans, discord is the natural parent of 
 social progress. The one sort of intestine discord that is incurable 
 and merely ruinous is the discord of a man's reason when divided 
 against itself. Into that discord has fallen the intelligence of Mr 
 Goldwin Smith. He crowns his criticism of the Home Rule 
 principle with the claim that nearly all the " wealth and intelli- 
 gence " of Ireland are on the side of the old state of things — 
 this after making out that the " Celtic Irish " have no intelligence 
 worth reckoning with, and that it is " Saxon Irish " who lead the 
 " Celtic Irish." When an English intelligence which might be 
 expected to be impartial puts the case thus, the value of the 
 Irish intelligence which joins cause with Irish " wealth " may 
 be fjuickly calculated. 
 
 And there is something more amiss in Dr Smith's polemic 
 than even the prejudice and self-contradiction which have been 
 passed under review. The line between passion and disingenuous- 
 
MR GOLDWIN SMITH S POLEIVIIC. 293 
 
 ness is deliberately crossed, as it happens, at the very outset of 
 his essay. He begins : 
 
 " It is proposed that Celtic and Catholic Ireland shall be made a 
 separate nation with a Parliament of its own, and that into this nation 
 Saxon and Protestant Ulster shall, against its loill and in spite of its 
 passionate appeals to the honour of the British people, deforced." 
 
 What are the facts ? Many Home Rulers, recognising the Ulster 
 difficulty, have proposed to meet it. Among other schemes, one 
 has been broached for the erection of Protestant Ulster into a 
 separate State with a separate Parliament, to stand in the same 
 relation as that of Catholic Ireland with the future Federal Parlia- 
 ment. And how was this suggestion met ? By loud' Ulsterical 
 protests that Ulster would never abandon the scattered Protestants 
 of Southern Ireland ; that she would share their fate, whatever it 
 might be. After this, the initial statement of Dr Smith is a 
 specific imposture, sought to be palmed off on the whole English- 
 speaking world. There is a limit to the toleration of false witness 
 in the name of Saxonism and Protestantism and Ulsteria. The 
 Ulsterite may, if he likes, demand separate treatment : he may 
 not go on protesting that he is denied separate treatment when 
 he has expressly refused to accept such treatment. If we are to 
 infer Ulster character from Ulster symptoms, in Dr Smith's 
 fashion, we shall be tempted to decide that the man of Ulster 
 is typically a blatherskite and a braggart, and that the truth is 
 not in him, whatever else may be. At present his main function 
 is to help the cause of the Catholic South by showing how much 
 more brutal and fanatical and hysterical a Protestant may be than 
 a Catholic. But even he, scientifically considered, is capable of 
 improvement, like other people. 
 
VIII. 
 
 MR FROUDE ON IRELAND. 
 
 § I- 
 
 A MORE interesting question for a literary plebiscitum than a 
 good many that have been propounded would be this, Who is 
 the most mischievous English writer of the day ? I cannot 
 pretend to guess how the decision of the majority would be 
 likely to go, but I should have little hesitation in casting my own 
 vote for Mr James Anthony Froude. That is a grave thing for 
 a conscientious person, however obscure, to say of anybody else ; 
 but fairly weighty reasons can be given in this case in support of 
 the charge. Let the reader ask himself concerning Mr Froude's 
 last three books, say, what is their aim, what kind of counsel 
 they give on the social problems of the age, and what kind of 
 effect they are likely to have on political thought and action ; 
 and unless he happens to belong to the Bismarckian school he 
 will find it hard to give answers that will sound eulogistic. 
 Oceana was a sample of the higher book-making that gave 
 painful proof of the extent to which literary faculty can be turned 
 to evil purposes. Written with abundant fluency and vivacity, it 
 secured attention for a set of fractious sentiments unconnected 
 by any statable theory, undignified even by a stedfast misanthropy, 
 but breathing at best a pessimism never far from commonplace 
 literary spleen. Go to that book for light on imperial policy, 
 for calm analysis, for wise forecast, and you find instead the 
 wavering marsh-lights of an insincere and theatrical unbelief in 
 humanity, dashed by the gusty empiricism of the mess-room. 
 But Mr Froude, all the same, is a brilliant writer ; his book sold 
 very widely, its facile rhetoric putting no strain on any man's 
 
 1 This article, written in Mr Froude's lifetime (1889), is left in the present 
 tense, because the writer could not well put the same stress of criticism in a 
 retrospective discussion of a dead man's work as he could in a censure which 
 the subject was alive to answer; though he has no doubt as to the strict justice 
 of all the blame passed. 
 294 
 
MR FROUDE ON IRELAND. 295 
 
 thinking power ; and so we got next The English in the ]Vesi 
 Indies, or the Boiv of Ulysses. The sort of poHtical wisdom 
 communicated by that book can be conveniently sampled by the 
 passage which explains the sub-title : 
 
 " I do not believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the 
 present generation of Englishmen to be capable of all that their 
 fathers were, and possibly of more ; but we are just now in a moulting 
 state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take another 
 metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not 
 eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of 
 the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her 
 substance, rivals of one another, each caring only for himself, but 
 with a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the 
 true lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the 
 cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of 
 the finger with the sharp note of the swallow ; and the arrows fly to 
 their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks 
 on approving from her coign of vantage." ' 
 
 I will not here pause to analyse Mr Froude's precious 
 metaphor, in which Penelope and Ulysses may each be Britain, 
 the suitors being portions thereof, or Ulysses may be the coming 
 dictator of the Carlyle-Froude gospel. Nor is it necessary to ask 
 what Mr Froude exactly means by the shooting of the pretenders. 
 What is worth doing is to note first what sheer claptrap is the 
 whole passage, and, second, how perfectly boyish is the poUtical 
 philosophy which the historian thus lays down for us in his old 
 age. He has never outgrown the schoolboy conception of his 
 nation as being an ideal aggregate existing for the purpose of 
 attaining corporate glory either by war or by simple bigness. 
 The nation as a concrete aggregate in which the multitude are 
 crushed by joyless toil, while the few live in varying degrees of 
 idleness and sensual luxury — this he cannot see, though the voice 
 of it goes before his face, " steaming up, a lamentation, and an 
 ancient tale of wrong." It is the barest justice to Carlyle to say 
 that he never sunk to such hebetude as this. He could see that 
 the modern problem of England is not the maintaining of a 
 vaporous glory — of that prestige which, as he pointed out, 
 etymologically meant a lie. He saw and taught that the problem 
 was the actual lot of the men and women who make up England 
 — their relation to each other, as rich and poor, workers and 
 idlers, governors and governed. Not in his last senility could 
 he have penned the fustian of his disciple. 
 
 ' Pp. 15, 16. 
 
296 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 And yet Mr Froude does catch a glimpse of the truth after 
 all, only in order to read it backwards and add positive to 
 negative folly. " Perhaps," he decides in conclusion, 
 
 " Perhaps if we look to the real origin of all that has gone wrong 
 with us . . . we shall find it in our own distractions, in the form of 
 government which is fast developing" into a civil war under the 
 semblance of peace, where party is more than country, and a victory 
 at the hustings over a candidate of opposite principles more glorious 
 than a victory in tJic field oi'er a foreign foe. Society in republican 
 Rome was so much interested in the faction fights of Clodius and 
 Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of Crassus and 
 a Roman army. The senate would have sold Caesar to the Celtic 
 chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English enthusiast would disintegrate 
 the British Islands (!) to purchase the Irish vote. Till we can rise 
 into some nobler sphere of thought and conduct we may lay aside the 
 7>ision of a confederated cmpireP 
 
 Thus deeply can Mr P'roude see into the riddle of his genera- 
 tion, with the history of Rome to help him. After a special 
 study of the fall of the Republic, he cannot tell that the real 
 cause of that was the collapse of Republican society by its dis- 
 solution into two groups of iniquitously rich and hopelessly poor. 
 For him, transcendental to the last, the cause was simply low 
 " ideals " of thought and conduct, and his prescription to his 
 time is just to get high ideals. And the high ideals are to be — 
 what ? Aspirations, not for the dignifying of individual and 
 national life in itself by removing squalid misery and idle wealth, 
 but for " the vision of a confederated empire," and for " victory 
 in the field over a foreign foe." Is it worth while to reply to 
 such a prophet of the music-halls that a victory of ideas is as 
 much more glorious than victory in a field of carnage, as the 
 ideal of the civilised thinker is better than that of the Pawnee ? 
 
 From a book so begun and so ended, what good to mankind 
 can come ? We do not even have facts that we can trust in 
 regard to the things Mr Froude professes to have studied in the 
 West Indies. After reading Mr Salmon on the " Caribbean 
 Confederation," one feels that the historian is as little trustworthy 
 in West Indian matters as scholars have proved him to be in the 
 affairs of ancient Rome ; and his name appears to be becoming 
 literally a byword in the Indies and Australia for hasty and 
 baseless statement.^ But Mr Froude's vivacity of style continues 
 
 ^ Some reader in the British Museum, zealous for truth but oblivious of the 
 rules of the library, has made a terse comment on the margin of its copy of 
 I'he EngUsli in the West Indies. In his account of Trinidad (p. 63) Mr 
 
MR FROUDE ON IRELAND. 297 
 
 to secure him readers, and " Penelope Britannia " listens more or 
 less to the voice of this pretender. 
 
 Now comes The Two Chiefs of Dicnboy, or An Irish 
 Romance of the Last Century, in which Mr Froude essays to 
 write at once a novel and a homily on Irish affairs, combining 
 the art-methods of the literary generation before last with a 
 temper and a sociology all his own. This is not the place to 
 discuss the book as a work of fiction. Suffice it to say, on that 
 head, that Mr Froude does not appear to recognise any pro- 
 gress in the art of novel-writing since Scott ; that his power of 
 character-drawing is very limited, though he sketches some good 
 old conventional types with considerable vigour ; and that quite 
 the best passages in the book are those describing fights, particu- 
 larly the sea chase of a privateer by a British frigate. He has 
 founded his hero, apparently, on the historic Colonel Eyre, and 
 has drawn some quasi-humorous local colour from the Memoirs 
 of Sir Jonah Barrington. His vacillating and valueless doctrine 
 concerning Ireland and the Irish problem he drew from his own 
 perturbed and capricious judgment. 
 
 " Colonel Goring," he says of his murdered hero at the close, 
 " belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed 
 fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory 
 of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the 
 Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived 
 by a single enthusiast." That is to say. Colonel Goring was too 
 late, but yet was not too late if only he had been allowed fair 
 play and had not been otherwise too late. What then was the 
 late Colonel Goring's policy ? Let his fluent creator tell : 
 
 " He had studied Ireland anxiously. He had observed with disgust 
 the growing weakness of the Protestant settlement and the reviving 
 energy of the Catholics. To him, an Englishman of the old Puritan 
 School, the Pope was anti-Christ. He absolutely disbelieved that 
 Irish Popery could be Ijrought citlicr by connivance or toleration into 
 loyal relations with the English Crown. He did not liice penal laws. 
 He knew that the relations of his own country with the Catholic 
 Powers of Europe made the etiforcenient of such laws impossible, e.\- 
 
 Froude makes the statement : " cocoa and coffee plantations and indigo planta- 
 tions increase." The pencilled comment is :— " Not so— no indigo there. 
 Trinidadi..\n." The chances arc that the Trinidadian is right. 
 
298 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 cept spasmodically and uncertainly, and he thought that laws which 
 were not meant to be obeyed were better off the Statute Book. But he 
 was conviueed also that Ireland could only be permanently attached 
 to the British Crown if the Protestants were there in strength eiwuglt 
 to hold their own ground. Cromwell's policy of establishing Protestant 
 settlements South as well as North was the only rational one.'' ^ 
 
 I would call attention to this as a compendious illustration of 
 Mr Froude's habits of political thought. Written with every 
 appearance of confidence, the passage is but a string of self- 
 stultifications. First we are told in Colonel Goring's scheme 
 that there is to be 710 tolerance whatever of Catholicism (as there 
 was none in Colonel Eyre's practice) ; and it is obvious that not 
 to tolerate Catholicism means to enforce penal laws. In the 
 next breath we learn that Colonel Goring did not like penal laws 
 because they could not be enforced in the face of the protests of 
 Catholic States which had it in their power similarly to oppress 
 Protestants. Finally we are told that Goring's idea was to make 
 all over Ireland, on Cromwell's principle, Protestant plantations 
 which should be able to "hold their own"; and we are left to 
 imagine how Catholicism is to be suppressed as Anti-Christ with- 
 out penal laws. It would be difficult to cite from the writings 
 of any man who ever claimed to speak with authority on matters 
 of conduct, such another display of irrelevance and incon- 
 sequence. But the confusion of the passage, I take it, will 
 surprise nobody who has sought to extract from Mr Froude's 
 English in Ireland any coherent doctrine as to the Irish 
 problem ; and as little will the student of Mr Froude's earlier 
 works be astonished at the primitive barbarism, the pre-Burkean 
 blindness, of the political prescription he lays down in his novel. 
 
 The Two Chiefs of Z)unl?oy, as a whole, serves chiefly to 
 raise afresh the question raised formerly by its author's books and 
 by his lectures in the United States, namely, What is his real 
 opinion about the Irish ? It might have been supposed that^ 
 conscious as he must be that his English in Ireland said 
 nothing, or rather said everything by turns, on that head, he 
 would have seen in his novel a useful means of expressing an 
 intelligible opinion, the more so as his book is no' dispassionate 
 Shaksperean presentiment of life, but as explicitly didactic as 
 Robert Elsmere. But the novel is, if possible, more self-contra- 
 dictory, more vacillating, more distracted in its doctrine than the 
 historic treatise. The truth is that Mr Froude never did and 
 never will hold to a consistent opinion on any subject whatever, 
 
 1 Pp. 59-60. 
 
MR FROUDE ON IRELAND. 299 
 
 § 3. 
 
 We have seen how he gives to his hero his own distraction of 
 doctrine in sum : let us see how the confusion fulfils itself in 
 detail. Again and again do we have the cheap and common- 
 place assumption of a " double dose of original sin " in the Irish 
 or " Celtic " race. " So far as accurate knowledge goes," he 
 makes a shrewd character say (p. 350) as against a crotchetty 
 one, " the Irish race have always been noisy, useless, and in- 
 effectual. They draw their picture in their own annals. They 
 have produced nothing, they have done nothing, which it is 
 possible to admire. What they are they have always been, 
 and the only hope for them is that their ridiculous Irish 
 nationality should be buried and forgotten." Then we have 
 Mr Froude's own allusion, in a description of the villain 
 (p. 130), to "the abject manner under which every Irishman 
 knows so well how to conceal his real feeling" — this though he 
 introduces many Irishmen who show no trace of abjectness. If 
 this be not enough, we have the leading Irish patriot and hero in 
 the story made to say of his race (p.371) : "What were we when 
 we had the island to ourselves ? If you can believe those glorious 
 ballad singers and annalists of ours, we were no better than the 
 cannibals of the Pacific. If we were again free, we should cut 
 one another's throats in the old style." There is no hint in any 
 of these or similar passages that the barbarism of the Irish was 
 much the same sort of thing as the barbarism of the Saxon 
 Heptarchy. There is no reminder that England had her Wars 
 of the Roses. There is not a word of reflection as to how 
 Ireland might conceivably have developed if England had left her 
 alone. There is no question as to how far Welsh development 
 has been a success under different auspices. It is just taken for 
 granted that the Irish are an unimproveable race. 
 
 And yet, as of old, we have the per contra. Colonel Goring 
 is made to say (p. 175) : "I have heard others say that the faults 
 of the Irish are the faults of a noble nature, which has been 
 wrenched out of its proper shape. I believe it now ; for in no 
 race in this world could I have found man or woman who would 
 have risked what you [a girl who saved his life] have risked to 
 save one whom you have been told to look on as the enemy of 
 your country." And we have (p. 158) the old admission that 
 the Normans settled in Ireland became more Irish than the Irish 
 themselves ; Teutons being thus confessed to develop Irish 
 characteristics under Irish circumstances. The upshot of which 
 
300 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 is — ? This or nothing — that the way to settle the Irish problem 
 is (or once was) to flood Ireland with English Protestants, 
 refusing to tolerate Catholicism but making no law to put it 
 down. 
 
 The grotesque nugatoriness of all this, I repeat, does not come 
 of any artistic impartiality of Mr Froude the novelist, but from 
 the incurable intellectual instability of Mr Froude the thinker 
 and publicist. He is repeating in the form of a novel the see- 
 saw of his former explicit argumentations. It is worth while 
 going back on the old medley, if it were only to show more fully 
 how worthless is the counsel which does so much to inspire 
 English policy at the present moment. At the beginning of 
 The E)iglish in Ireland Mr Froude appears to lay down a 
 tolerably positive if ill-digested doctrine : 
 
 " In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well- 
 being on the conduct of our neighbours, and yet are created infinitely 
 unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a 
 natural right to govern ; the inferior part has a natural right to be 
 governed ; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority 
 is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human 
 beings. Among wild beasts and savages might constitutes right. 
 Among reasonable beings right is for ever tending to create might. 
 Inferiority of numbers is compensated by superior cohesiveness, in- 
 telligence, and daring. The better sort of men submit willingly to 
 be governed by those who are wiser and nobler than themselves," ^ 
 
 — i.e.^ by those who are better than the better sort. 
 
 Yet even in the opening section the fatal infirmity of the 
 writer's mind destructively asserts itself. 
 
 " When resistance has been tried and failed — when the inequality 
 has been proved beyond dispute by long and painful experience — the 
 wisdom, and itltiinatcly the duty, of the weaker party is to accept the 
 benefits that are offered in exchange for submission : and a nation 
 which at once will not defend its liberties in the field, nor yet allow 
 itself to be governed, but struggles to preserve the independence 
 which it wants the spirit to uphold in arms, by insubordination and 
 anarchy and secret crime, may bewail its wrongs in wild and weeping 
 eloquence in the ears of mankind — may at length, in a time when the 
 methods by which sterner ages repressed this kind of conduct are 
 unpermitted, make itself so intolerable as to be cast off and bidden go 
 upon its own bad way : but it will not go for its own benefit ; it will 
 have established no principle and vindicated no natural right ; liberty 
 
 ' English in Ireland, ed. 1 88 1, i. i-2. 
 
MR FROUDE ON IRELAND. 3OI 
 
 profits only those who can govern themselves better than others can 
 govern them, and those who are able to govern themselves wisely 
 have no need to petition for a privilege which they can keep or take 
 for themseh^es."* 
 
 I doubt whether a more aimless and pointless piece of mock 
 reasoning was ever concocted by a serious historian. It is the 
 declamation of a hysterical weakling. Evidently enough Mr 
 Froude does not feel the slightest confidence in his preaching 
 as to the " duty " of the Irish or the natural tendency of things. 
 And the same vacillation comes out still more ruinously at the 
 close of the book. We have, of course, some positive doctrine : 
 
 "As the Asiatics are, so are the Irish. An Englishman would 
 revolt against a despotism, however just the despotism mig-ht be. 
 The Irishman is instinctively loyal to an authority which is not afraid 
 to assert itself. He respects courage ; he despises cowardice. Rule 
 him resolutely, and he will not rebel ; rule him justly, and he will 
 follow you to the world's end."- 
 
 It is quite needless to rebut this happy stroke of sociology, of 
 which the whole basis is the assumption that the political ideals 
 of Irishmen in the nineteenth century are those of barbarian Irish- 
 men in the fourteenth. Mr Froude himself makes it abundantly 
 clear that his generalisation amounts to nothing : 
 
 "England will never touch Ireland except under pressure of agita- 
 tion : she then finds something must be done ; she does the ' some- 
 thing' in a hurry to get rid of the subject, and she finds she has 
 created more harm than she has cured." ^ Again : " The English 
 people do not see that to remove even just grounds of complaint is 
 made useless by the form in which the concession is made. They 
 never legislate beforehand with a desire to be just ; they wait for 
 rebellion or danger of it, and then they yield without dignity and 
 without deliberation. What they give is accepted without gratitude, 
 and is regarded only as a victory won in the campaign which is being 
 fought for the independence oflreland. If there was a hope that 
 anything which we could give would make the Irish contented and 
 loyal subjects of the British Empire, no sacrifice would be too great 
 for such an object. But there is no such hope. The land tenure is 
 not the real grievance. It is merely a pretext. The real grievance is 
 our presence in Ireland at all."* And again: "Mr Gladstone is a 
 statesman. . . . He has perhaps recognised that from the date 
 of the Conquest we have neglected every duty which a ruling power 
 owes to its subjects." ^ 
 
 1/^/., p. 6. "III. 558. 3/^/., p. 574. 
 
 * P. 581. ' P. 583- 
 
302 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Of course these sweeping admissions are sweepingly contra- 
 dicted in other parts of the book, where it occurs to Mr Froude 
 to assert that " England " as a whole is naturally just in her 
 disposition towards weaker States in her grasp : 
 
 "Everything which she [England] most valued for herself— her 
 laws, and liberties, her orderly and settled government, the most 
 ample security for person and property — England's first desire was to 
 give to Ireland in fullest measure. The temper in which she was met 
 exasperated her into hardness and cruelty . . . till it seemed at last 
 as if no solution of the problem were possible save the destraction or 
 expulsion of a race which appeared incurable." ' 
 
 Against this it is sufficient to place the previous quotations, 
 with, say, Mr Froude's admission in his novel (p. 159) as to the 
 insane iniquity of " England " towards the Etiglish planted in 
 Ireland : 
 
 " When the last rebellion was crushed, Ireland was a sheet of paper 
 on which England might have written what character she pleased. 
 Like a wanton child with a toy, she had no sooner accomplished her 
 long task than she set herself to work to spoil it again. She destroyed 
 the industries of her colonists by Jier trade larus. She set her Bishops 
 to rob them of their religion." 
 
 So that Mr Froude, the most destructive opponent of Mr 
 Froude, recognises with his usual versatility that England, even 
 in recent centuries, has seemed more incapable of rational justice 
 to affiliated communities outside of her own borders than any 
 State since the time of Carthage. Still the see-saw goes on : 
 
 " Were England, even now at this eleventh hour, to say that she 
 recognised the state of Ireland to be a disgrace to her, that . . . the 
 constitution would be suspended, and that the three southern pro- 
 vinces would for half a century be governed by the Crown, the com- 
 mittee of the Land League are well aware that without a shot being 
 fired in the field their functions would be at an end." - 
 
 Much virtue in an " if." We are seeing at present how it 
 serves to half suspend the constitution ; and the effect on Irish 
 discontent is not hard to discover. It does not tend to satisfy 
 Mr Froude. The prescription is that "England," the hypo- 
 thetical national unit of one mind, bent on acting towards out- 
 siders as a master or officer towards his subordinates, is simply 
 to forget that she is herself the scene of a struggle of the poor 
 against the rich, and of a progressive democratism, and is to 
 
 ^ /(/., i. 14. ' English in Ireland, iii. 5S3. 
 
MR FROUDE ON I RELAX J), 303 
 
 make believe to be a good healthy Oriental despotism. Of 
 course the accommodating Mr Froude admits that there is no 
 more practical meaning in this than in his other generalisations ; 
 so we get this final double somersault ; 
 
 " But I am told that it is impossible. . . . Despotism is out of date. 
 We can govern India ; we cannot govern Ireland. Be it so." [IVeeps.l 
 *' Then let Ireland be free." [After all these volumes.] " She is miser- 
 able because she is unruled. We might rule her, but we will not " 
 [wilful "we," "thirty millions, mostly fools"], "lest our arrangements 
 at home might be interfered with. In an independent Ireland the 
 ablest and strongest would come to the front, and the baser elements 
 be crushed. The state of things which would ensue would not be 
 satisfactory to us" [strange to say, "we" don't want the best in 
 Ireland to get uppermost, and the worst undermost !] "but at least 
 there would be no longer the inversion of the natural order which is 
 maintained by the English connection, and the compelled slavery 
 of education and intelligence" [a/i'as, absentee landlords] "to the 
 numerical majority. This too is called impossible — yet if we will 
 neither rule Ireland nor allow the Irish to rule themselves, nature and 
 fact may tell us that whether we will or no, an experiment which has 
 lasted for seven hundi-ed years shall be tried no longer." ^ 
 
 — World without end. Amen ! It is a free country, and you 
 may hold about Ireland whatever opinion you please, even as 
 Mr Froude thinks everything he pleases, that is to say, every- 
 thing by turns and nothing long. 
 
 Is it possible, one asks, to regard with any respect an empiric 
 of this kind ? One says once more that there was never a more 
 flagrant case of saddling the wrong horse than the proceeding of 
 holding up as Mr Froude's principal literary misdeed his publica- 
 tion of the Carlyle documents. There, with of course his usual 
 frailty in detail, he was helping the world to some truth : in his 
 own books, expressing his own message, he is a perpetual influ- 
 ence for moral darkness. Any reader who peruses Mr Froude 
 without arriving at a clear view of his mischievousness is either 
 demoralised by his contagious confusion or hardened by him in 
 similar empiricism and prejudice. It was truly said of him long 
 ago that his historic researches on Ireland only opened up an 
 old wound, for he went to work with a view, not to calmly 
 
 ' Pp. 584-5. 
 
304 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 showing that in the past both sides had been brutal, wicked,, 
 and mad, but to showing contemporaries how much reason they 
 had to harbour old grudges. A man of his temper, whose con- 
 victions are sentiments and whose sentiments are moods, could 
 only work on mood and sentiment, zealously reminding Pro- 
 testants of the massacre of 1641, and anon reminding Catholics 
 of Protestant tyranny, and leaving them recriminating, without a 
 hint that the true lesson of the past was that we should turn our 
 back on it and bring cool reason to bear on the present. His 
 own leading quality is just that which he is always condemning 
 in the Irish race, infirmity of purpose ; ^ and he covers it with 
 just the bluster that he attributes to them as constitutional. 
 Condemning their racial vanity, he displays his own in claptrap 
 worthy of a schoolboy, intimating ^ that " Englishmen are not 
 easily frightened at the sound of danger," and so forth. 
 
 And wdthal, when challenged, as he was by Father Burke in 
 New York in 1872, he affects the boii enfant and claims to be 
 himself a warm friend of Ireland. As thus : 
 
 " I have been accused of having nothing- practical to propose for 
 Ireland. I have something extremely practical. / iija7it to see the 
 peasants taken from inidcr tJic power of their landlords^ and made 
 answerable to no autJiority but the latv. It would not be difficult to 
 define for what offence a tenant might be legally deprived of his 
 holding. He ought not to be dependent on the caprice of any indi- 
 vidual man. If Father Burke and his friends will help in that way, 
 instead of agitating for a separation from England, I would sooner 
 find myself working with him than against him."^ 
 
 That was sixteen years ago. And in the interval Mr Froude's 
 whole pernicious influence has gone to inflame the dogged and 
 stupid English obstinacy that has at length made Home Rule a 
 necessity and a certainty ; Liberal and Tory leaders equally 
 leading up to the issue, and the Liberal only saving appearances 
 at the last moment by suddenly turning a somersault without a 
 warning to the bewildered multitude. 
 
 1 Curiously enough he has developed a tendency to the so-called Irish 
 "bull." As here: " Two of the boats chosen were the fastest the Colonel 
 had. . . . The third was smaller and lighter, and was the stuffest of the 
 three" {Two Chiefs of Dunboy, pp. 186-7). 
 
 - Two Chiefs, p. 185. 
 
 ^ Lecture in answer to Father Burke, New York, December 1st, 1872 : 
 printed in Fronde's Crusade. Both Sides. New York, 1873, p. 35. 
 
IX. 
 
 MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION.^ 
 
 A GOOD deal of cross-swearing goes on over the question of the 
 condition of Ireland before the English Conquest, and the pre- 
 cise effect of English rule in checking Irish civilisation. In his 
 recent speech in the House of Commons,- Mr Davitt made the 
 often-repeated remark that Ireland was a Christian country with 
 a high civilisation while England was in a state of heathen 
 barbarism. This is one extreme in the clash of sweeping asser- 
 tions. A little reflection might show Irish patriots that if Ireland 
 was thus civilised while England was barbarous, Ireland must of 
 her own nature have retrograded before the Conquest of Ireland 
 under Henry II. It is true, nevertheless, that before the con- 
 quest Ireland was in parts much richer and happier than it has 
 been during more than one long and frightful period under 
 English rule ; and it is this fact that English Tories sedulously 
 ignore. The extreme of false history on their side is reached 
 in Mr Balfour's speech on the second reading of the Home Rule 
 Bill in the House, on the night of the division.^ Among other 
 things he said : 
 
 " He had not been indisposed to admit that in the history of Ireland, 
 England had often played a sorry part ; but he did not admit that in 
 the great tragedy extending over all these centuries England had been 
 the villain of the piece. (Hear, hear.) It was not true. He felt dis- 
 gusted at the creeping hypocrisy — when it was not ignorance — (hear, 
 hear) — which threw upon this country, and this country above all, the 
 responsibility or more than half the responsibility for Irish ills. The 
 Prime Minister was fond of quoting the opinion of the civiHsed world. 
 The civilised world took its opinion, with other sources, from the 
 speeches of English politicians ; and if English politicians went about 
 abusing England — (loud Opposition cheers) — no wonder that foreign 
 writers, unaccustomed to our peculiar method of political controversy, 
 
 ■ 1 Written in May, iS9_3. - March or April, 1S93. ^ 1893. 
 
 U 3°5 
 
306 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 took English politicians at their word. (Opposition cheers.) What 
 was the fact ? Before the English power went to Ireland, Ireland was 
 a collection of tribes waging constant and internecine warfare. All 
 law, all civilisation in Ireland was the work of England. (Opposition 
 cheers, and Nationalist cries of ' Oh,' and laughter. An Hon. 
 Member : ' Destruction.') The perfect unity that Ireland now enjoyed 
 was also the work of England, and the Parliament which Ireland 
 desired to have restored to her — what was that but the work of 
 England } " 
 
 There is certainly a good deal of creeping hypocrisy in England ; 
 and there is also a fair amount of perpendicular misstatement. 
 Mr Balfour affects both methods. It is easy to say that before 
 the conquest Ireland was a scene of internecine war. So was 
 Scandinavia at the same or an earlier period. So was England 
 before the Danish and again before the Norman Conquest. 
 Then does England owe all its civilisation to the Danes and 
 Normans ? Is it not reasonable to surmise that Ireland would 
 have reached some sort of law and order as other countries were 
 doing, if only she had been left to work out her own salvation ? 
 There as elsewhere a strong central power would tend to arise in 
 the ordinary course of military evolution. If this be denied by 
 Mr Balfour's party, as they are wont to deny every reasonable 
 sociological proposition as to the potentialities of the Irish people, 
 let them turn to the authority of one of the few eminent students 
 of political science on their own side. It is the anti-democratic 
 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, of Tory and legalist memory, who 
 writes : 
 
 "The Anglo-Norman settlement on the east coast of Ireland acted 
 like a running sore, constantly irritating the Celtic regions beyond the 
 Pale, and deepening the confusion which prevailed there. If the 
 country had been left to itself, one of the great Irish tribes would 
 almost certainly have conquered the rest. All the legal ideas which, 
 little conscious as we are of the source, come to us from the existence 
 of a strong central government, lending its vigour to the arm of justice, 
 would have made their way into the Brehon law ; and the gap betweeti 
 the alleged civilisation of Efiglattd and the alleged barbarism of 
 Ireland during much of their history, which was in reality ?iarrower 
 tlian is commonly supposed, would have almost wholly disappeared." * 
 
 All that can be urged in rebuttal of this is that the Danish cities 
 constituted already an open sore ; and that they had set up an 
 
 ^ Early History of Institutions, pp, 54, 55. 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 307 
 
 ecclesiastical strife in addition to the racial enmity by adhering 
 to Rome through England. But this last was really a phase of 
 the English connection ; and if Danes and Irish had been left to 
 fight matters out, the Danes would in all likelihood have been 
 absorbed as they were in England and Scotland. The Danes 
 alone could not have permanently kept Ireland distracted as the 
 English power did. There as elsewhere there were forces of 
 change ; and though Ireland's capital disadvantage was that she 
 lay to the west of England, and could not so easily as England 
 catch the culture influences of the Continent, some continental 
 intercourse she must have had ; and the intercourse of nations 
 has in all ages been the great cause of progress. What is more, 
 though war in early stages of culture is a grievous hindrance, many 
 of the arts of civilisation may flourish and go far among war- 
 ring tribes. It was so in Ancient Greece ; it was so among the 
 warring Italian Republics, which had a marvellously high culture 
 at a time when strongly governed monarchies to the north were 
 sunk in barbarism. For the rest, Mr Balfour's proposition as 
 to England having civilised Ireland, put as he puts it, is really 
 one of the most perverse assertions that have been made in the 
 whole course of the Home Rule dispute. In order to see fairly 
 and squarely the truth all round, let us first cite an able and im- 
 partial summary of the condition of Ireland before the conquest, 
 written by a lover of Ireland, an authority to the full as high as 
 Maine in Maine's own field, a Scotchman and not much of a 
 pietist, but strongly resentful of the English misgovernment of 
 Ireland from the first. It is J. F. McLennan who writes : — 
 
 " The law of succession was a powerful obstacle to political pro- 
 gress. The Sept had always a chief, and a tanist, who was to be the 
 chief's successor. When a chief died the tanist became chief, and a 
 new tanist was elected. Any male of full age, belonging to the leading 
 family group, was eligible for the office. The brother of the chief, or 
 the male next to him in age of the same family, was usually chosen ; 
 but frequently the appointment was the occasion of a contest ; in 
 which success lay with the most cunning and high-handed. These 
 contests frequently led to feuds, and divided the sept into hostile 
 factions. The law which gave the septmen the power of election was 
 tanistry ; the same law regulated the succession to the headship in all 
 the groups, and even to the kingship. It is needless to say that it 
 favoured social disintegration. It divided the sept ; it divided the 
 tribe ; and it rent the kingdom. The law of property, on the other 
 hand, was a powerful obstacle to industry, and, in particular, to agri- 
 cultural improvement. The septs were the only landholders ; the sept- 
 
308 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 lands were enjoyed according to the law of gavelkind, which rendered 
 all the land tenures uncertain. By this law the common was divisible 
 among the family groups, on the principle of relative equality ; practi- 
 cally the stronger got the larger shares. When death threw lands 
 vacant, the chief, as trustee for the sept, assumed the whole lands, 
 and re-divided them — a partition called a gavel. Had the arts of 
 agriculture been known, they could not have been exercised to any 
 great extent under a system which, constantly changing the occupancy 
 of lands, rendered it uncertain whether the labourer would enjoy the 
 fruits of his labour. The consequence was that the people were 
 mainly shepherds or herdsmen. 
 
 "With such customs and laws, the Irish were in the rear of most 
 of the peoples of Europe. No doubt, in some parts of France and 
 Germany, in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, races were to be found 
 quite as low. But the majority of the European races were almost as 
 far ahead of the Irish, as the Irish of to-day are of the Maoris. The 
 forms which make the real distinctions between nations are organic, 
 hidden as it were under the surface. And European society generally 
 rested on a framework of a higher type than the Irish — a superior 
 family and political system, with superior laws of property and suc- 
 cession. Superficially viewed, the races of the Continent may have 
 appeared quite as barbaric ; they may have been more lawless and 
 turbulent. Moreover, as these races were mostly pagan, it is easy to 
 understand how, in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Irish, burning 
 with the zeal of recent conversion to Christianity, and possessing some 
 schools of Christian learning, might appear to be in advance of them. 
 Missionaries from Ireland were carrying the new light into the dark 
 places in which paganism was still enshrined. Her music and poetry 
 — products of Keltic genius — were celebrated. Her sons were dis- 
 tinguished by wit as by piety. All these were distinctions bespeaking 
 a species of superiority. Yet might they all of them have been pre- 
 sented by a nation of even still lower organisation. The really dis- 
 tinctive marks of inferiority remained ; common property, the gavel, 
 tanistry, an imperfect system of kinship. Most of the Europeans had 
 left these behind. Even the Kelts of Britain had got rid of them 
 under their Roman masters, and were separated by a gulf from their 
 congeners of Ireland. At the time of the Roman Conquest they were 
 probably lower in the scale. Caesar found among them customs which 
 throw light on the Irish institutions. But it was their good fortune, 
 for four hundred years, to be under the influence of the most advanced 
 civiUsation the world then knew. To this day the Irish have not 
 received an equivalent training. They were long left to work out 
 their own advancement : and unfortunately for them, Christianity, 
 which for a moment seemed to make them superior to their pagan 
 neighbours, from incidents attending its introduction, did much to 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 309 
 
 stereotype their laws and customs, and to render a spontaneous onward 
 movement next to impossible." ' 
 
 All that need be said on McLennan's summing-up is that he 
 does not quite rightly discriminate the importance of property 
 laws in determining the grade of a people's civilisation. It may 
 be that only by way of a system of individual property can a 
 primitive people reach a high civilisation ; but it does not follow 
 that wherever such a system is introduced the civilisation rises. 
 And inasmuch as common property is in the end the highest 
 Utopia of civilisation, there might have been a fair degree of 
 civilisation alongside of it among the pre-Christian Irish, as there 
 was certainly much brutality and barbarism with individual pro- 
 perty among other nations. In any case, be it remembered, a 
 measure of common property in land, with periodical division by 
 the chief, is exactly the state of things described by Cresar as 
 existing among the Germans of his day. If it was bad for Celts, 
 it was bad for Teutons. As a matter of fact, the institution 
 has often been cited by Teutophiles as a proof of the idyllic 
 beauty of primitive Teutonic life. But gavelkind is not really 
 equivalent to community of property, as McLennan himself 
 shows : it was a system which excluded the advantages alike of 
 private property and of corporate cultivation, and practically 
 frustrated progress in agriculture. Thus the early Irish were 
 bad agriculturists, as were the Teutons in the time of Csesar 
 and of Tacitus. 
 
 For the rest, tanistry obviously was a system lending itself to 
 strife ; but it would be difificult to point to any northern people 
 at that time in which, under whatever system, strife was not 
 chronic. Tanistry was in fact an expedient to prevent military 
 disaster through the sudden death of a chief : the " brennus " or 
 commander in the campaigns of the Gauls seems always to have 
 had a tanist with him ; and in time of war the arrangement may 
 have been very useful, though in times of peace it may have 
 stirred strife. In any case, it should be remembered that alike 
 among the English before the Conquest, and under the feudal 
 Normans for long afterwards, desperate civil war was constantly 
 breaking out. No people that I can remember has ever found 
 for itself a short cut from barbarian militarism to orderly 
 government. 
 
 What is clear is that Christianity, as usual, did nothing in 
 itself to promote the necessary development : and on this head 
 
 'J. I-". yichzrm^n'?, Memoir 0/ 'J'hoinas Driii/niioiiJ, 1S6S, jip. 190- 192. 
 
3IO THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 the facts must be squarely 0[)posed to the prevaiHng Catholic 
 delusion : 
 
 "The Brehon or ancient Irish laws had been reduced to a written 
 code, under the immediate authority of St Patrick, or of one or other 
 of the persons who ha\e been rolled up into the Saint. They included 
 gavelkind, tanistry, and the law of the Eric or money compensations 
 for murder. And such was the veneration of the Irish for the instru- 
 ment of their conversion to Christianity, that they reverenced the code 
 as much as the religion. Patrick's law, as they loved to call it, was 
 declared to be unalterable ; and with that code no people could ad- 
 vance beyond a state of comparative savageness. 
 
 " Such was the social and political state of the Irish when their 
 relations with England commenced. The septmen — rude herdsmen, 
 probably not long settled from nomad life — are represented as living, 
 on the whole, in a miserable condition, borne down by the exactions of 
 their chiefs and kings — 'cuttings and cosheries' and ' coyne and livery.* 
 Beneath them were the Betaghs or slaves, in a condition still more 
 wretched. Above them were the chiefs, exercising lavish hospitalities 
 at the expense of their inferiors ; constantly intriguing against and 
 quarrelling with one another. In the palaces of the greater chiefs was 
 maintained no small degree of luxury, and even of barbaric splendour." ^ 
 
 That is to say, the condition of the Irish was very much the 
 same as that of the Teutonic nations at the same period, and 
 later. Modern research is now making havoc of the German 
 theory of the "free institutions" and "common tenure of land" 
 of the early Teutons ; and it is pretty clear that whatever their 
 system of tenure they had slavery and poverty among them 
 when they migrated to England, and that they did not escape 
 them there. The question is whether the Irish w^ere progressing 
 between the time of their Christianisation and the English con- 
 nection. Historians ready enough to say a good word for the 
 civilising effects of Christianity have decided that they were not, 
 that on the contrary they had greatly retrograded. Green writes 
 that in the reign of Henry the Second the civilisation of Ireland 
 had 
 
 " fallen far below the height which it had reached when its missionaries 
 brought religion and learning to the shores of Northumbria. Learning 
 had almost disappeared. The Christianity which had been a vital force 
 in the eighth century had died into asceticism and superstition in the 
 twelfth, and had ceased to influence the morality of the people at large. 
 The Church, destitute of any effective organisation, was powerless to 
 
 1 Id., pp. 192-3. 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 3II 
 
 do the work which it had done elsewhere in Western Europe, or to 
 introduce order into the anarchy of warring tribes. On the contrary, 
 it shared the anarchy around it. Its head, the Coarb, or Archbishop 
 of Armagh, sank into the hereditary chieftain of a clan ; its bishops 
 were without dioceses, and often mere dependents on the greater 
 monasteries. Hardly a trace of any central authority remained to knit 
 the tribes into a single nation." ' 
 
 It would be difificult to find a more decisive negation of the 
 current formula that Christianity is a civilising force. Yet the 
 churchman probably overstated the backwardness of Christian 
 Ireland. As McLennan suggests, it is easy to over-estimate 
 the value of the early " learning " ; and it is very certain that 
 the religion of the eighth century was just superstition and 
 asceticism, like that of the twelfth. We must carefully hold 
 the balances between Irish claims which recoil against Ireland, 
 and English claims which ignore comparative tests. Above 
 all we must note how much is due to the irruption of alien 
 barbarism. McLennan puts it thus : — 
 
 "The Irish were then, as they have often since proved, their own 
 worst enemies. There were other enemies, however, with whom they 
 had to contend. They might live peaceably, if they would, in the 
 midland, and on the coast to the north and west. But on the south 
 and east were points of terror and danger. These were the towns — • 
 almost the only places in Ireland worthy of the name — all in posses- 
 sion of the Danes. 
 
 "The Danes had now been firmly planted for upwards of three 
 hundred years on the land. Had the tribes united, they might have 
 swept the scourges of God into the sea, as afterwards they often might 
 have swept the Anglo-Normans. But they were not united, nor cap- 
 able of union for more than a moment and a single success. So the 
 scourges remained, finding the coast towns convenient ports of de- 
 parture on their predatory excursions by sea, and safe retreats from 
 the tribesmen on occasions of despoiling them. Resistance to the 
 same invaders had in England established the monarchy. In Ireland, 
 no political benefit had accrued, as a set-off to the centuries of suffer- 
 ing. At the end of the Danish period, as at its commencement, there 
 was still the pentarchy, and in the separate kingdoms the same low 
 order of political organisation. On the other hand, the presence of the 
 Danes checked the course of social improvement.- Indeed, if those 
 
 ^ Short History, P- 431. 
 
 - [Here there is perhaps room for doubt. The Danes in some respects could 
 give an object lesson to the Irish. .See above, p. 133. And it is not easy 
 to see how any social improvement could have arisen save in terms of foreign 
 
312 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 writers are correct who take such high ground as to Irish civihsation in 
 the sixth and seventh centuries, we must hold the Danes to have been 
 a cause of social retrogression. The presence of such an enemy, it 
 can be believed, may have had such an effect." ^ 
 
 This view may be held alongside of a moderate estimate of the 
 civilisation of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. Some 
 retrogression there may have been ; and there certainly appears 
 to have been no progress ; but the retrogression can hardly have 
 been very great. 
 
 But whereas religion had done nothing to promote Irish 
 civilisation, it was at length to do something that should de- 
 cisively hinder its progress. In the words of McLennan : 
 
 " The primitive Irish Church was Christian, but not Roman Catholic. 
 Though, in 1 152, a synod of its clergy acknowledged the See of Rome, 
 no Peter's pence seem to have been paid, and Rome was dissatisfied. 
 In 1 1 54 Pope Adrian IV., as ' King of all islands,' by a bull granted 
 the lordship of Ireland to Henry, for the express purpose of 'broaden- 
 ing the borders of the Church.' As his authority had two years 
 previously been acknowledged in Ireland, his simple object would 
 appear to have been to fill the Church coffers. The interests of Rome 
 juinped with the ambition of the Normans. It was decent, however, 
 that greed and rapine should cloak themselves with an ostensibly 
 noble purpose, and none could be more excellent than the extension 
 of the Faith. Let the Irish take what comfort they can from the fact 
 that the Conquest and its train of evils had such an origin." - 
 
 To make the picture complete, we have to note that the 
 Danish coast cities were now also Christian, and that, in their 
 hostility to the native Irish and their Church, these cities 
 " applied to the see of Canterbury for the ordination of their 
 bishops, and acknowledged a right of spiritual supervision in 
 Lanfranc and Anselm."^ It is fair to add that the Irish had 
 given the English King pretext for invading them in the Pope's 
 name, inasmuch as they carried on a slave trade in kidnapped 
 Englishmen ; but let us also remember what this testifies as to 
 the condition of England itself, w'here men kidnapped their 
 fellows and sold them into Irish slavery. Further, we must 
 remember that the English " Strongbow " was a " broken man " 
 who went over in the pay of the native King Dermot. The 
 
 influence. On tlie other hand, the Danes as a matter of fact played a most 
 destructive part as regarded the monasteries, which were the centres of Irish 
 culture, such as it was.] 
 
 1/,/., pp. 193-4. Vr/., p. 195. •= Green, p. 432. 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 
 
 O^ J 
 
 question now is, what has the Enghsh connection done to de- 
 velop Irish civihsation ? 
 
 It is admitted by all historians that for centuries after the first 
 contact under Henry the Second no good was done to Ireland 
 by the English connection, but only harm. Whatever Mr Balfour 
 may mean by asserting that England brought order and civilisa- 
 tion into Ireland, he cannot pretend that it did so during the 
 iSIiddle Ages. McLennan rightly says : 
 
 " It is important that the primitive state of the Irish should be 
 understood, because it was preserved almost unchanged till near the 
 beginning, and, in some parts, even till near the end, of the seven- 
 teenth century. In the long interval between the landing of the 
 Anglo-Normans and the final suppression, by James I., of the Brehon 
 law, no organic improvement whatever had taken place. The sept 
 system was still in force, with gavelkind and tanistry, and all the 
 other impediments which it presented to progress. The political 
 system, such as it was, had crumbled beneath intestine feuds and 
 the pressure of the English enemy : instead of the five provinces of 
 the earlier time there were ninety 'regions' in Ireland — beyond the 
 Pale — under absolutely independent chiefs. If, then, the nation of 
 the tribes has been trained to respect the settled order of government, 
 or laws and institutions of a type higher than its own, this has been 
 effected within comparatively recent times." ' 
 
 Now, this fact alone, rightly considered, is the confutation of 
 Mr Balfour's pretence. Nothing worse could have happened to 
 Ireland, left to itself, than to remain wholly unprogressive for 
 four hundred years ; and no amount of civil war could work 
 more awful evil than was wrought under Elizabeth on behalf 
 of Protestantism. The Papacy, which as we saw literally gave 
 Ireland away to England, would not in ordinary course have 
 stifled her nascent civilisation as it tended to do higher civilisa- 
 tion in general. But the power of England was even what the 
 Papacy itself proved to be in distracted Italy — "a stone in the 
 wound." The curse of the English connection was that Ireland 
 was neither conquered nor let alone. The Anglo-Normans were 
 not the people to civilise or improve any other race by contact 
 with them. Europe has perhaps never seen a ruling race less 
 gifted with the Roman power of orderly administration. Their 
 brutality lashed into fierce and undying resistance the virtually 
 English people of Lowland Scotland, who might easily have been 
 amalgamated under the first h^dward if only his officials could 
 
 1 Work cited, pji. 1 94- 5- 
 
314 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 have ruled provincials with decent judgment. But there was in 
 the feudal Norman a barbaric recklessness, a puerile insolence, 
 which wholly unfitted him to wield Roman rule. Prince John, 
 who to more than average Norman ability joined a more than 
 average Norman offensiveness, made himself so intolerable tO' 
 the Irish chieftains that his father had to recall him. Soon after- 
 wards, the Saxon and Norman elements, joining to secure con- 
 stitutional freedom in England, wrung from John the Magna 
 Charta ; but there was no thought in England of a Magna Charta 
 for Ireland. She was left to stew in her own juice. The English 
 of the Pale naturally tended to become Irish ; and so John 
 made war on them and exiled the leading barons. But the re- 
 established Pale, cut off from native Ireland, cut off by sea from 
 England, remained as before a fountain of national disease. It 
 still tended to become Irish ; and if only England had stood 
 aloof the island would in time somehow have shaken down into 
 a stable system, as systems then went. England, however, must 
 needs chronically exert herself to keep the Pale English, profess- 
 ing horror at the " degradation " of the English in Ireland, but 
 caring not a jot for the native Irish. So Ireland was reinvaded 
 with reformative intent by Richard Second, who might have set 
 up a real English rule if he had not immediately had to look 
 to himself at home. His work was left barely begun. Then 
 for several generations English distractions left Ireland to 
 gravitate again towards the primitive and comparatively healthy 
 barbarism, the condition from which, in normal course, a native 
 system would tend to arise. The Pale shrank mile by mile 
 towards Dublin, the last English foothold. But then came 
 Henry Eighth, with his hands free enough at home to allow him 
 to " reconquer " Ireland, that is to say, to give the English 
 element there just vigour enough to renew the old inflammation, the 
 old clash of forces, to an extent that made real settlement hope- 
 less. At the hands of Henry came the most clinging evil of all 
 — the erection of a religious division in addition to that of race. 
 Peace was now not to be even planned for. So much more 
 of evil was religion to do. Ireland was always having to be 
 " reconquered," by invasion, by massacre, by beast-like ferocity, 
 by brutally stupid expulsion of natives, by settlements of English 
 and Scotch, by penal laws against Catholics, by laws against 
 Irish trade, by one atrocious wickedness or another, down to our 
 own era of convulsive and senseless Coercion Acts, the end of 
 which is at hand. She was reconquered under Henry, under 
 Elizabeth, under Cromwell, under Pitt ; recolonised under James 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 315 
 
 and under William ; commercially repressed under William and 
 Anne and the Georges; administratively coerced under Victoria by 
 Liberals and Tories alike ; bedevilled and misgoverned by all for 
 lack of the root principles of pacific statesmanship ; till at length 
 the Liberals, driven to admit that the problem is finally insoluble on 
 English lines, have resolved to let the Irish settle it on their own. 
 Let us once more listen to McLennan's analysis of the process 
 of the disease set up by the English intervention : 
 
 "The four centuries which followed [the Conquest] were centuries- 
 of constant feud and slaughter between the invaded and the invaders, 
 of wrongs and retaliations ever increasing with the lapse of time. 
 They were centuries in which the Anglo-Irish and the Irish were both 
 being brutalised by their conflicts — in which, at least, they were re- 
 ceiving the worst possible training for future peaceable cohabitation. 
 The peoples were in effect all the time enemies, living under different 
 laws and government. The law of England was ' by law ' established 
 within the Pale ; practically there was no law but the will of the 
 stronger. There were at one time within it nine Counties Palatine- — 
 unmitigated despotisms. Beyond these, the rule of a rude aristocracy, 
 unrestrained by the presence of sovereignty, was a virtual anarchy. 
 Outside the Pale were the tribes — their laws, language, and customs 
 all unchanged. There was one main source of the never-ending 
 conflict between the races, namely the land, which the barons were 
 there to take and the Irish to defend. When the barons were united, 
 they held what they took ; when they fell out, the Septmen regained 
 their own. And the area of the Pale was always broadening or con- 
 tracting. Sept and tribal wars — wars with the barons — baronial wars, 
 in which the Septs took sides — ■ were the stock incidents of the 
 miserable drama. On an unusual parade of English power, the chiefs 
 hurried to do homage — lip submission, over with the danger which 
 evoked it. 
 
 "The conflict of the laws was, perhaps, as productive of bad blood 
 as the conflict of the land ; at least, the native historians have made 
 rather more use of it to keep alive the Enghsh hatred of England. A 
 Septman who slew an Englishman was, by native law, liable only in 
 the Eric — a money payment to the relatives of the slain. By the 
 English, however, if they caught him, he was hanged, in defiance of 
 the Cain Patric. By English law, on the other hand, to kill an Irish- 
 man was no murder. He was an outlaw and enemy of the Crown. 
 To break a contract with him was no wrong ; he could not sue in the 
 English courts. The slaughter of the Irish and seizure of their pro- 
 perty were acts rewarded by the Government. They helped to give 
 the substance where there was little beyond the name of dominion. So 
 the Irish were plundered and massacred at will, subject only to the 
 
3l6 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 restraints imposed by the fear of retaliation. Five of the Septs, more 
 fortunate than their neighbours, were treated differently, being allowed 
 the benefit of the English law. A common defence in charges of 
 murder was that the murdered man was of ' the mere Irish,' and not of 
 the qiiitiqiic sanguines — the five favoured bloods. It might be imagined 
 that the Septmen in love with the Cain Patric were beyond the law 
 because they chose not to come within it. This was not the case. 
 To get rid of the disadvantages of their position, they repeatedly peti- 
 tioned for admission to the benefits of English law, and were always 
 refused. ' The petitions, indeed, were uniformly treated with con- 
 tempt. To have granted them would have been to abandon the 
 privilege of oppression. Even the Irish within the Pale were not yet 
 within the law. They were the subjects of special enactments which 
 practically excluded them from its protection. By a statute dated 
 1465, for example, anyone might kill 'any person GOING TO rob or 
 steal, /laving no faithful man of good name or fame in Jiis company 
 in English apparel? This, of course, exposed every Irishman to be 
 killed at the discretion of any Englishman. It should be stated, how- 
 ever, that by the next Act of the same Parliament, the Septmen ot 
 the Pale were directed to take English names, and to wear English 
 apparel." ^ 
 
 Here we have conditions of strife and anarchy so factitious, so 
 abnormal, that no nation in the world could have thriven under 
 them. To say, as even McLennan does, that the Irish if united 
 could have driven the aliens into the sea, is to ignore the great 
 fact of the case — the presence behind all of the preponderating 
 power of England, inevitably used to maintain so much of the 
 Pale as sufficed to keep Ireland divided against itself. The 
 half-savage Irish were at the worst little worse in their divisions 
 than the highly-civilised ancient Greeks, who first showed the 
 world how far self-government was possible. They were the 
 victims of a vast misfortune. 
 
 To say, in face of all this, that what civilisation Ireland has 
 attained is due to England, is, I repeat, to exhibit either hardy 
 " hypocrisy " or — what is probably the matter with Mr Balfour — 
 essential incapacity to understand the processes or the laws ot 
 poHtical growth. His formula is the formula of an empiric. He 
 puts together the two premisses : Ireland was barbarous when 
 England began to intermeddle : she is now partly civilised ; and 
 he draws the conclusion : Therefore she has England to thank 
 for her civilisation. It is the absurdest case of non sequitur. 
 
 ^ [On tills point, see above, p. 139.] 
 " Work cited, pp. 198-200. 
 
MR BALFOUR OX IRISH CIVILISATION. 317 
 
 Had Ireland been left alone, she could easily have become more 
 civilised through non-English influences than she is at present ; 
 and she could not conceivably have suffered from any other 
 hands such horrors as she has done at the hands of England. 
 Mr Balfour absurdly assumes that she would have remained 
 exactly as she was in the time of Henry the Second. She could 
 not possibly have done so, any more than England has done. 
 English civilisation has developed under pressure of the general 
 forces of European culture : Irish civilisation would of necessity 
 have developed to some extent under the same forces. The 
 greatest strides of European progress have been made since the 
 invention of printing ; and printing would have affected Irish 
 life as it has done English. One of the greatest impulses to 
 European commerce for thousands of years was the colonisation 
 of North America. Ireland, left to herself, would naturally have 
 profited by American trade in a high degree. The fact that 
 English and Irish passengers for the United States embark for 
 the main passage at Liverpool, and not on the west coast of 
 Ireland, is one of the standing evidences of how the chances of 
 Ireland were deliberately frustrated by English and pro-English 
 action. It is not a hundred years since Irish trade was relieved 
 of the wicked English laws made to repress it ; for when Pitt in 
 1785 wisely strove to make an end of them, he was baffled by 
 the Irish Parliament itself, which represented merely the land- 
 owners connected with the established Church, who cared nothing 
 for Irish manufactures, these being mostly carried on by Papists 
 and Dissenters. And it is just sixty-five years since Irish life was 
 relieved of the wicked sectarian laws framed in the interests of 
 English Protestantism. 
 
 English wickedness — that is one half of the story : English 
 blundering, that is the other half. The extent of the blundering 
 might alone suffice to dispose of the idle boast that the English 
 race has a special faculty for politics. No country in Christian 
 Europe, not even Russia with Poland, has such a colossal failure 
 standing to its account. Brutal Englishmen saw long ago — the 
 sentimentalist and idealist Spenser saw — that the only way to 
 make peace in Ireland was to make it either all English or all 
 Irish. English statecraft never got further than to introduce 
 enough of the alien element to keep Ireland for ever distracted 
 under English supremacy. And the English supremacy has 
 wrought in addition to other desperate evils the profound 
 economic evil of drawing the land-owning class to England, 
 so that a large share of the produce of Ireland — what she was 
 
3l8 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 allowed to produce — has for generations been exported as sheer 
 tribute. Now, a self-governed country situated as Ireland is, if 
 its landowners went voluntarily to reside in England, would be 
 led in natural course of policy to deal with that evil by specially 
 taxing rental ; and a self-governed Ireland, under a democratic 
 system, would infallibly legislate in that direction. Such legisla- 
 tion was eagerly proposed last century.^ But the old Irish 
 Parliament was a mere preserve of the landowners, who ruled 
 in their own interest ; and the predominant EngHsh land- 
 owning class has since ruled Ireland according to its own class 
 policy, from which Ireland has suffered immeasurably more than 
 England has done, owing precisely to the special factor of 
 absenteeism. 
 
 I am well aware that all the evils wrought in Ireland by bad 
 government have been terribly aggravated by the blind multipli- 
 cation of the people : I have elsewhere pointed this out in con- 
 futation of the one-sided doctrine of Mr Henry George, who 
 refuses to see the force of the law of population. But I will 
 here add, on that head, that in all reasonable probability over- 
 population in Ireland would never have run to the extent it has 
 done if the Irish people had been left in modern times to deal 
 with their own land question. Of all the senseless catchwords 
 of English race prejudice the most execrable is that which alleges 
 the innate recklessness of "the Celt." Parental and other pru- 
 dence has nowhere been more rigorously practised than in 
 France ; and English prejudice, as represented by Tennyson, 
 sees " the Celt " personified in France whenever Frenchmen do 
 a foolish thing that England does not happen to be doing at the 
 moment. For that matter, however, the fact that Englishmen 
 have any given state of things inside their own doors has never 
 hindered them from exclaiming at the same state of things 
 among their neighbours. Within the past six months we have 
 had endless head-wagging in England over the " corruption " 
 revealed in France by the Panama scandal, while we have had 
 on our own hands at least three scandals of the same sort, all of 
 them gigantic, if singly less gigantic than that of the Panama 
 undertaking, which is simply the greatest because France is un- 
 happily the most parsimonious and investment-seeking nation. 
 
 Mr Balfour was loudly applauded by his followers, as was to 
 
 be expected, when he protested against English politicians going 
 
 about denouncing England. That is none the less the best 
 
 service an Englishman can do to England, in connection with 
 
 ' See the Wealth of Natiom, B. v., ch. 2, M'Culloch's ed., p. 405. 
 
MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION. 319 
 
 the Irish issue ; and we shall never put our politics on a scientific 
 basis till we have substituted for the childish and vulgar habit 
 of national self-praise the habit of national self-criticism. Mr 
 Balfour's plan is the immemorial method of the empiric, fooling 
 his hearers with elementary flattery, and turning all history to the 
 account of the most puerile instincts. To tell in plain English 
 what England did to Ireland under Elizabeth, and under Crom- 
 well, is to tell one of the most awful tales of blood and devasta- 
 tion that human history retains. The bare recital of the facts 
 haunts one like a nightmare. Again and again we read of 
 .systematic massacres of men, women, and children ; but that is 
 next to nothing in comparison with the rest. It is the ever- 
 recurring picture of subterhuman misery among the survivors 
 that burns itself in on the mind — the picture of tribes of human 
 beings driven to die of slow hunger in the wilderness, like wild 
 beasts ; of gaunt wretches, unable to stand erect, crawling out of 
 ditches to feed on corpses by way of change from feeding on 
 weeds. Englishmen have in the past recorded these things 
 without a thought of remorse for bringing them about ; and at 
 the very time that these Irish horrors were happening, or still 
 fresh in memory. Englishmen were vociferous in denouncing the 
 cruelties of the Spaniards and the Dutch to the lower races who 
 fell into their clutches. " Creeping hypocrisy " could not go 
 further than blatant national self-righteousness had done in 
 these matters. The nation which has wrought the wickedness 
 has ever had a hundred words of abuse for the victim against 
 one word of self-reproach. If there were any utility or any sense 
 in keeping up national animosities, Irishmen might well hate 
 England with a desperate hatred ; and the wonder is, not that 
 they have so hated her, but that so many of them have been so 
 soon able to put the old passion aside. They have learned or are 
 learning the lesson that national animosities are only the reverse 
 side of the old insane ferocities which gave rise to them ; and that 
 to hate our fellow creatures because their ancestors injured ours 
 is to approximate to the ethical standards of the dead wrongdoers. 
 And the lesson would be learned still more rapidly on the Irish 
 side — that is, on the Irish Nationalist side — were it not for the 
 fatuity and the prejudice displayed on the so-called Unionist 
 side in England ; in the speeches of Mr Chamberlain, who 
 vituperates the men with whom he once caballed against his 
 own colleagues ; in the speeches of inept aristocrats like Sir 
 Henry Chaplin, the very types of the political incompetence that 
 has created the Irish problem ; in the speeches of perverse 
 
320 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 partisan leaders like j\lr Balfour, who elect to be the political 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water for fanatics in whose 
 religion they can only sham belief, and for dullards in whose 
 ideals of life they can only wearily affect to share. It is strictly 
 accurate to say that there are not now more than two prominent 
 Unionists in Parliament who ever exhibited the true spirit of 
 union towards Ireland in the days — as late as ten years ago — 
 when some of us still vainly hoped that England might learn to 
 treat Ireland in Parliament as an integral part of the Union. 
 The men who now call themselves Unionist are almost invariably 
 those who are incapable of real unionism. All things considered, 
 we shall be wonderfully lucky if, with such a dead weight of 
 unreasoning prejudice among us still, we can so much as cut the 
 knot of the Irish problem by Mr Gladstone's measure, leaving 
 the loose ends to be dealt with later. 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 A PROGRAM FOR IRELAND. 
 
 Since 1886 it has become clear that the EngUsh ParUament 
 cannot be looked to for any solution of the Irish problem save 
 that which is a solution on the English side — the letting Ireland 
 manage her own affairs. As Mill put it thirty years ago, "the 
 difficulty of governing Ireland lies entirely in our own minds : it 
 is a difficulty of understanding." ^ That lack of intelligence is 
 palpable still, and it will long subsist, inasmuch as the interest of 
 the rich idle class is bound up with the misunderstanding of 
 other people's. England, \vith her enormous industry resting on 
 a basis of vanishing coal, is still too far from being face to face 
 with the fundamental facts of her existence to permit of her 
 people being driven to put it on a scientific footing. With 
 Ireland, the case is different. She has been only too long at 
 handgrips with nature not to know, throughout her population, 
 exactly where at least half of her problem lies. And it may be 
 hoped that when the Irish people get Home Rule they will 
 approach the solution. 
 
 Inasmuch, then, as Home Rule is the indispensable first step, 
 any program for Ireland must include a Home Rule scheme ; 
 and as the failure of Mr Gladstone's is in large part due to its 
 own faults, it may be worth while to offer an outline of another. 
 
 § I. A Federal Constitution. 
 
 The obviously indefensible point of Mr Gladstone's plan is the 
 illogical relation it would create between Ireland and the imperial 
 Parliament. On his lines there are open only the alternative 
 courses of {a) excluding all Irish representatives from the im- 
 perial Parliament, while taxing Ireland for imperial purposes, and 
 \b) admitting Irish members to the imperial Parliament, in any 
 number to be agreed upon, thus permitting Ireland to have a 
 share in controlling English and Scotch home affairs while 
 
 ^ England and Ireland, p. 47. 
 
0-- 
 
 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Englishmen and Scotchmen have no control over those of 
 Ireland. Between these hopeless alternatives Mr Gladstone 
 helplessly oscillated. He had seen long ago the desperateness 
 of the problem, when he declared that it would pass the wit of 
 man to devise a Home Rule scheme which should escape both 
 difficulties ; and it is one of the illustrations of the demoralising 
 influence of the hand-to-mouth habit in politics that he later 
 turned his back on his own avowal and protested that the 
 solution was tolerably easy. As all the world knows, his solu- 
 tion was only an impossible proposal from which he had to make 
 a humiliating retreat — the proposal that Irish members should in 
 perpetuity go in and out of the imperial Parliament according to 
 the nature of the business being done : a thing possible as a 
 temporary expedient in an emergency, but out of the question 
 as a permanent arrangement. Such are the shifts to which a 
 statesman can be driven for want of general principles. 
 
 The dilemma is of course set up by the presupposition that 
 the Parliament at Westminster is to remain the general legisla- 
 ture for the rest of the country after Ireland is separately pro- 
 vided for. Mr Gladstone would not face the logical conclusion 
 — that the central Parliament must be reconstituted when a sub- 
 ordinate Parliament is created. He cannot have overlooked this 
 solution — the establishment of a true Federal Constitution for all 
 the parts of the United Kingdom, giving a subordinate legislature 
 to each, and putting over them a new central imperial Parliament, 
 to which each province shall send representatives in proportion to 
 its weight. He knew that a scheme of federation was actually 
 said to have been contemplated by the Liberal leaders as a 
 solution of the Irish problem fifty years ago.^ It must be that 
 he recoiled from an undertaking so vast, craving rather a course 
 not too long and arduous for his closing years. The ambition 
 thus to heal an ancient breach, as a last task before the end 
 come, is indeed a high and a worthy one ; but the destinies of 
 nations cannot fitly be shaped by such velleities. Mr Gladstone's 
 well-meaning haste has come to nothing : his scheme stands dis- 
 credited on its merits ; and the cause of Home Rule cannot make 
 headway until a better be framed. There were not wanting signs, 
 before Mr Gladstone's resignation, that a number of his colleagues 
 saw the Federal solution to be inevitable, and that he had become 
 aware of their conviction. But no such scheme has been officially 
 formulated ; and it is important that the Irish people should turn 
 its agitation to the desirable end, by way of putting the Nationalist 
 
 ' Special As/>ec/s of the Irish Qiu'stion, p. 294. 
 
EPILOGUE. 323 
 
 cause on a fresh footing. If the Irish members continue to re- 
 coil from such a systematic policy, on the score that it is their 
 business to get Home Rule speedily, and not to reconstruct the 
 entire British Constitution, they will but doom themselves to 
 impotence and leave the whole matter to be dealt with by another 
 generation. There is no escaping from the fact that Mr Glad- 
 stone's Home Rule Bills were both bad measures, in respect that 
 they struck respectively on the two horns of the dilemma above 
 stated. Several of his colleagues have let it be seen that they have 
 little heart to fight for ever on unsound ground. It is for the 
 Irish Parliamentary party then to accept the unalterable, and 
 recommence the campaign on lines that can be fought without 
 flinching. The greater task, logically laid out, is more feasible 
 than the smaller, laid out in defiance of reason. The im- 
 memorial disease of Irish life is not to be cured without long 
 travail ; and to refuse to attempt to do the work systematically 
 and coherently is simply to show unfitness for all leadership 
 therein. 
 
 Let us posit briefly the main gains that will accrue to a 
 systematic settlement by way of a Federal Constitution for the 
 United Kingdom. 
 
 1. The arrangement will leave no opening for fresh agitation 
 or extension of claims ; whereas a Dublin Parliament with one 
 hand tied by arbitrary vetoes, looking always on the free action 
 of a British Parliament not so hampered, would infallibly strain 
 at its tether, and struggle for further powers. Under a Federal 
 system, the legislatures of all sections of the composite State will 
 have exactly the same powers and lie under exactly the same 
 limitations. 
 
 2. If Ireland were put on a footing analogous to that of the 
 colonies, she would be encouraged by the very nature of the 
 arrangement to demand as much independence as the colonies 
 possess, and above all their right to tax imports. Under a 
 Federal system, free trade between all sections of the Federa- 
 tion is a matter of course. 
 
 3. Under a Federal system, the imperial Parliament will be 
 specially charged with the enforcement of the obligations of each 
 of the federated provinces, whereas the position of the present 
 Parliament, with a Dublin Parliament subordinated to it and 
 striving to elude its control, would be almost hopelessly difficult. 
 
 4. No sense of grievance could be felt by the other provinces ; 
 whereas, were Irish members to sit at Westminster under Mr 
 Gladstone's second scheme, the grievance of the British popula- 
 
324 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 tion would be as intolerable as that of the Irish people would be 
 under his first scheme, which taxed them for imperial purposes 
 yet gave them no voice in imperial affairs. 
 
 As for the prospect of realising such a program, it may be 
 remarked that not only are there no weak points in the position 
 such as left Mr Gladstone's open to unanswerable criticism, but 
 a number of politicians now on the side of Unionism have avowed 
 that they could not resist a Federal scheme as they have resisted 
 Mr Gladstone's. What is no less important is the gain of power 
 that would come of throwing nearly all the main forces of 
 Liberalism on one line ; for the movement against the House of 
 Lords would be literally embodied in a movement for Federation, 
 since there could be no House of Lords under a scientific con- 
 stitution ; and the movement for Welsh Disestablishment would 
 be equally embodied in a Welsh claim for Home Rule. 
 
 § 2. Pi-ovisioii for Ulster. 
 
 Next to the crux of the retention or exclusion of Irish members, 
 the most assailable point in Mr Gladstone's Home Rule policy 
 w^as certainly the Ulster difficulty. Before he adopted a Home 
 Rule policy, those of us who discussed the theory on its merits 
 often put to Home Rulers of old standing the question how the 
 principle would work for Ulster. The result was invariably quite 
 unsatisfactory : the problem had not been thought out ; and the 
 questioner was usually led to the conclusion that for Home 
 Rulers nationality was defined by sea-beach. Either they ad- 
 mitted and postponed the Ulster difficulty, or they flatly declared 
 that Ulster must be coerced if need be. This was a sad outcome 
 of the principle that peoples ought to decide for themselves how 
 they should be governed, and that alien rule should be forced on 
 none capable of self-rule. It is perfectly clear that if Irish 
 Catholics have a right to object to English rule in Ireland, Irish 
 Protestants have a right to object to Catholic rule. One does not 
 say they have as good reasons : they cannot have ; for England 
 has actually misgoverned Ireland for ages, while Catholic Ireland 
 has never yet had a Home Parliament at all. But the Home 
 Rule principle does not admit the question of sufficiency of 
 reason ; it insists on the right of every people to choose ; and 
 the Ulster Orangemen choose as emphatically as do the Catholics. 
 
 The one-sidedness of the Home Rulers, however, is very well 
 balanced, ethically speaking, by the one-sidedness of the Orange- 
 men. Perhaps no party in modern times has taken its stand 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 3-'5 
 
 more undisguisedly on injustice. The Home Rulers, English 
 and Irish, do propose that Orangemen should have equal rights 
 in an Irish Parliament ; the Orangemen expressly declare that 
 they will not only not have Home Rule for themselves, but will, if 
 possible, prevent the Catholics from having it. What they resent 
 as an injustice to themselves — alien authority or partnership — 
 they would brazenly enforce on their neighbours. Whatever may 
 be the solution of the difficulty, this tone cannot be listened to by 
 principled Radicals. The inspiration of Orangeism is primarily 
 mere religious hate ; that lies on the surface of the boasted 
 fraternisation of Ulster Radicals and Tories. Never was there a 
 better illustration of the law that men must love to hate, fraternise 
 to fight. But, all the same, popular religious hate is a factor 
 that must be carefully reckoned with, especially in the politics of 
 backward and fanatical communities like those of Ireland. The 
 Orangemen, whatever the orderliness of the 1892 Convention, 
 are many of them blatant and violent men. But legislation 
 must take account of the existence of blatant and violent men ; 
 and there are plenty of them in the Home Rule party. 
 
 If, then, no change comes over the attitude of Protestant 
 Ulster when the Home Rule problem is definitely taken hold 
 of, Ulster must be rationally provided for. It may very well be, 
 of course, that a change will occur : there are signs of one even 
 now, in the dissatisfaction of Ulster farmers with their situation, 
 and with the first course of the Coalition Government, which was 
 pledged to the landlord interest. The real interest of the 
 peasantry being the same throughout Ireland, it is only gross 
 religious bigotry that can keep those of Ulster hostile to Home 
 Rule. But religious bigotry is obviously a tenacious passion, 
 and there is plenty of machinery in Ulster to keep it alive and 
 active ; and as it is impossible to plan a policy on the mere 
 chance of its rapid decline, we must face the probability of its 
 continuing to sunder the Protestant faction from the Irish popu- 
 lation proper. 
 
 Shortly put, the question for Radical Home Rulers is. What 
 arrangement is to be made for Ulster? But that question in- 
 stantly evokes another — How much of Ulster? Ulster is not 
 wholly Protestant. Even in the Protestant towns there are 
 strong Catholic contingents ; and some constituencies are pre- 
 dominantly Catholic. Clearly, if Ireland is not a unity, if it is 
 politically only a "geographical expression," Ulster is on the 
 same footing; and if Orange communities in Ireland are to be 
 separately legislated for, so must be Catholic communities in 
 
326 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 Ulster. Four out of the nine counties, Donegal, Fermanagh, 
 Monaghan, and Cavan, were in the 1 886-1 892 Parliament 
 wholly represented by Home Rulers ; Tyrone returned two 
 Home Rulers out of four members ; Armagh one out of three ; 
 and Down one out of four; the town of Londonderry, almost 
 equally divided, returned a Home Ruler ; and even in Belfast 
 one was elected out of the town's four members. If those 
 elections be found to represent the lasting state of opinion, those 
 constituencies would on the abstract Home Rule principle be 
 entitled to a share in an Irish Parliament, which they join in 
 demanding ; that is, unless it be decided that Belfast and the 
 counties are to be reckoned as unities, and the minority divisions 
 are to succumb to the majority. 
 
 It is hard to see, however, how this can be plausibly proposed 
 as regards the counties. A Home Rule section even of Belfast, 
 as of County Down, is theoretically a separate community 
 relatively to the town or the county, just as Orangemen are a 
 separate community relatively to Ireland, or Irish Home Rulers 
 relatively to England. Indeed, when we work out the question 
 of communities, it is clear that, from the point of view of prin- 
 ciple, an Orange minority in the Home Rule division of Belfast 
 is logically entitled to cast in its lot with Orangedom. But here 
 we come to the end of the tether of principle, so to speak. We 
 must work on a basis of possibilities; and for the purposes of our 
 practical politics communities cannot be reckoned with in terms 
 of anything less than constituencies. If the Home Rule principle 
 
 not fully applied, in respect of there being recalcitrants within 
 a constituency, it is because it cannot be. 
 
 Here, however, rises the question, If the minority of a con- 
 stituency must succumb, why should not the minority divisions 
 of a town or a county ? In the case of the constituency, we lay 
 down a non possunms : in the case of the town or the county we 
 cannot strictly so plead ; but it is very obvious that to divide a 
 town into different State jurisdictions must be extremely incon- 
 venient, if not insufferably so. Government must finally be 
 squared with public peace ; and if we gave a Dublin legislature 
 rule over one quarter of Belfast, thus enforcing a breaking up of 
 the municipality, we should be running the gravest danger of 
 public strife. It would indeed be a practical certainty ; and 
 probably no government or party would propose such a division. 
 And here we come to the practical definition of a community for 
 the purposes of this discussion, namely, A popidation in zvhich 
 I'ival jurisdictions cannot be set up without constant danger of feud. 
 
EPILOGUE. 
 
 O-/ 
 
 It is a somewhat unexpected conclusion. To solve a problem of 
 oppugnancies we are forced to a negative definition. 
 
 With the counties the case is different. If we contemplate the 
 cutting-up of Ireland into two jurisdictions at all, we may as well 
 re-arrange the shires or provinces, leaving out of the Uublin- 
 Home-Rule jurisdiction Antrim, Londonderry, half of Tyrone, 
 two-thirds of Armagh, and three-fourths of county Down, or 
 otherwise as voting may now go. But here again there will be 
 one source of friction almost incompatible wnth order. The 
 town of Londonderry would have Home Rule, and the surround- 
 ing county something else, unless future elections go differently ; 
 and it is difficult to imagine such an arrangement working without 
 quarrels. It would probably be well to leave Londonderry town 
 with its county. Part of county Down, on the other hand, would 
 be under Dublin Home Rule, and Belfast otherwise ; but, as it 
 happens, and as might be expected, it is in the south divisions 
 of Down and Armagh that the Nationalists have the majority ; 
 and a line drawn across those portions of these counties, and 
 across Tyrone up to the west border of county Londonderry, 
 would leave a compact north-eastern province representing Orange 
 or Conservative Ulster. Some division might indeed be practic- 
 able in Londonderry ; while on the other hand it might be diffi- 
 cult to divide Tyrone ; but such difficulties might be settled by 
 a small amount of compromise on both sides. Such partial 
 compromise would be justified by sheer necessity, which forces 
 the leaving of Belfast as a whole to Orangedom. 
 
 Given a real Orange province, then, cut out of and different 
 from the present semi-Catholic province of Ulster, the question 
 arises. What is to be done with it? The first and most satis- 
 factory answer, from the Radical point of view, is that Orange 
 Ulster may be constituted a separate community or State with 
 its own local legislature, on the United States plan ; while the 
 rest of Ireland is constituted a separate State, with its legislature 
 at Dublin or wherever else it pleases. (An impartial outsider 
 would be disposed to suggest Cork, which is close to one of the 
 best harbours in the world, and is more essentially " national " 
 than Dublin, which looks to England.) These two province- 
 States would alike have Home Rule ; and a comprehensive and 
 logical scheme would empower them both to send representatives 
 to an "imperial" Parliament, created by a reconstruction of the 
 British constitution on a federal system, under which, say, Scot- 
 land (or North and South Scotland), Wales, and England (or two 
 or more sections of England) should alike have their local legis- 
 
32S TllK SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 latures, while sending representatives to an imperial Parliament 
 that should have nothmg but imperial affairs to deal with. 
 
 Some Orangemen, however, declare that they will not accept 
 Home Rule of any sort, and demand that their present connection 
 with England shall be maintained. This attitude is obviously 
 inspired by the religious malice which makes them hostile to the 
 self-government of Catholics by Catholics. They are anxious to 
 be "part of England" primarily in order to spite Catholic Ireland. 
 But it cannot for a moment be admitted that Orangemen have a 
 claim on England to the extent of its keeping up a dangerous 
 source of strife in Ireland. Orangemen indeed hate Catholics 
 about as much as many Home Rulers have been prepared to 
 hate England ; but the psychological provocativeness of a specifi- ' 
 cally alien jurisdiction is more permanent and more intense than 
 that of difference of creed in a race with the same accent and the 
 same name. A Protestant state and a Catholic state in Ireland, 
 with separate state legislatures, could get on much better together 
 than the latter could with an English state ruled from London. 
 Englishmen are indeed in a manner bound to see that Orange- 
 men are constitutionally safeguarded against intervention by the 
 Catholic Irish legislature, but that is all. The cry about " aban- 
 donment " would be the merest perversity in the face of such an 
 arrangement as is above proposed ; and would be entitled to no 
 respect as coming from people who have repeatedly talked of 
 resisting legislation proposed to be carried in the Plritish Par- 
 liament. Orangemen would have a clear choice. Either they 
 could be constituted into a separate federal state, independent of 
 the Catholic state, and sending like that representatives to the 
 imperial Parliament ; or they could be left without Parliainoitary 
 govertiment altogether. The chances are a hundred to one that 
 they will not make that choice. Religious malice prevents them 
 from seeing the plain expediency of making Ireland into one state, 
 with one legislature, but it will hardly lead them to deny them- 
 selves representative government. The inevitable movement of 
 democracy within Orangedom, once the pretext of danger from 
 Popery is nullified, would force either the establishment of an 
 Orange legislature or coalition with the Catholic state. In any 
 case, the whole responsibility of choice would lie with the Orange 
 faction, who would be left without any show of grievance. The 
 plan of two Irish state legislatures would take the main ground 
 from under Lord Salisbury's appeal, and would cancel the one 
 valid argument against a Home Rule policy as generally con- 
 ceived. I recollect to have seen, in 1885 or 1886, a scheme 
 
EPILOGUE. 329 
 
 of provincial legislatures for Ireland ; but I cannot remember 
 whether in this scheme the provinces were to send representatives 
 to London or to a central Irish Parliament at Dublin. There 
 seems, however, to be no necessity for having anything but one 
 Protestant and one Catholic province ; and in that case there 
 could be no superior Parliament save the "imperial." 
 
 It will be necessary, however, on the plan proposed, to have a 
 clear understanding as to what are to be imperial affairs and 
 what are not. On this point Home Rulers have been much 
 wanting in clearness. They often allude to " local " affairs as if 
 these consisted mainly in municipal and county administration. 
 But local government in a system of Federal States would include 
 the making of land laws, and, if the American example is to be 
 followed, marriage-laws and criminal laws. Difference of laws in 
 these matters is a grave drawback : but the line cannot be drawn 
 short of some such devolution of legislative power on the States 
 if the arrangement is to meet Irish needs. The vetoes of Mr 
 Gladstone's original Bill were reducible to no consistent principle; 
 and it would be bad statesmanship to set up a constitution which 
 the mass of the Irish people would be constantly burning to alter. 
 All that the English and Irish aristocratic party can reasonably 
 ask for in the matter of the land laws is that there shall be 
 provision against confiscation of landlords' rights ; and this may 
 be effected by a previous purchase transaction on the lines of Mr 
 Gladstone's proposals. If the " English majority " will not trust 
 an Irish Parliament to deal fairly by landlords, their alternative 
 is to employ English credit as Mr Gladstone proposed. But the 
 policy of Ireland, to be permanently successful, must go beyond 
 mere purchase of landlords' rights and provision for the transfer 
 of ownership to the tenants. The events of the past twenty-five 
 years have shown that, though the creation of peasant proprietor- 
 ship fifty years ago might possibly have enabled the peasantry to 
 meet the new situation, a system of transfer which presupposes a 
 regular power of payment on the tenant's part is practically sure 
 to break down. Were it only for that reason, another solution 
 must be found if Ireland under Home Rule is not to be merely 
 miserable with a difference. 
 
 8 6- 
 
 NationalisafioH of Rent. 
 
 Even if, indeed, there were a fair prospect that in a genera- 
 tion the present tenants might carry through a process of purchase 
 which should make tlicni owners of their farms, it is not at all 
 
2,30 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 likely that Ireland would then be at an end of her agrarian 
 troubles. It is indeed odd that any one should suppose so. A 
 system involving five hundred thousand small proprietors is of 
 course much more conducive to national happiness than a system 
 which keeps the land in the hands of a thousand landlords 
 with five hundred thousand tenants, provided that under the 
 small-proprietor system agriculture is not worsened, and that the 
 standard of life is not lowered by multiplication of families and 
 holdings. And we may suppose that, despite the influence of 
 the priesthood, the Irish peasantry, like the French, would be 
 gradually led by simple proprietorship to restrain their families 
 and so avoid the progressive reduction of size of holdings to 
 absurdity. In Ireland, however, the reform, so long delayed, will 
 be extremely hard to begin ; and there would be for a time a 
 strong tendency to cut up farms under the new system as under 
 the old. Such subdivision infallibly means misery ; and such 
 misery means the purchase of broken men's lands by others. 
 Thus the cutting-up process would be followed by one of estate- 
 making. And even without widespread subdivision, in the 
 absence of a law forcing the divison of estates that are above a 
 certain size, the normal process of capitalism tends to the creation 
 of large estates. Under a system of peasant proprietary, there 
 would be no hindrance to the purchase of various holdings by 
 any one man who could persuade the holders to sell ; and the 
 simple fact that farms vary in quality would further tend to bring 
 about the old inequalities. Men with large families to provide 
 for, sufferers from sickness, men with bad luck in live stock, 
 would tend to lose their property, and others would acquire it. 
 In France at this moment, under the law of equal division of the 
 property of parents among children, it constantly happens that a 
 peasant farmer has to borrow money to pay to his sisters and 
 brothers the value of their share ; so that, though the statistics 
 are hard to get, it is notorious that the French peasantry in 
 general are an indebted class. In a country where there was a 
 tendency to capitalistic farming, such holdings would be very apt 
 to be sold. It would only need, then, a generation or two to 
 produce in Ireland a number of new rich landowners, who would 
 let their land to tenants as did the old ; and the agrarian 
 problem, supposing it to have disappeared in the interim, would 
 reopen. For what mining and manufacturing industry is in 
 England, that agriculture (including pasturage) is in Ireland — the 
 main source of the subsistence of the nation ; and as industrial 
 trouble is inevitable in England, pending the coming of a scien- 
 
EPILOGUE. 331 
 
 tific social system, so agrarian trouble is inevitable in Ireland,, 
 pending the creation of a scientific land system. 
 
 Now, it is a much easier matter to settle the land problem on 
 scientific lines, howbeit not on a final footing, than it is to reduce 
 the industrial problem to any scientific footing at all ; and it is 
 relatively easier still when, as in the case of Ireland, the public 
 intelligence has already been brought to contemplate a sweeping 
 measure of land purchase, by State action.^ It only needs that 
 instead of turning its effort to the creation of peasant proprietors, 
 the State should retain all property in the land, and make the 
 farmers and cotters its tenants, giving them not only the security 
 of tenure which they need but the further security that their rents 
 shall never become impossible for them in respect of bad seasons 
 or unforeseen competition. 
 
 That is to say, the State should fix the rent due from each 
 holding, first, on the basis of the market value of the farm under 
 the existing laws before the commencement of the State's owner- 
 ship, and afterwards, year by year, on the basis of the average 
 prices of (i) market produce, or (2) of the produce special to 
 any district or class of farm ; or (3) in respect of new outside 
 conditions, such as the rise of towns, roads, and railways. The 
 rent, in short, should be on a sliding scale. In this way and in 
 this way only is it possible to prevent chronic strife, and the 
 chronic ruin of thousands of cultivators. As the rent would be 
 fixed each year with regard to the variations of market prices 
 from the level at which it was first fixed by valuation, and to the 
 variation of the advantages of site, the same tests would apply 
 everywhere, and tenants who were specially industrious or spe- 
 cially skilful would duly profit by their industry and their skill. 
 This may not be the final principle of remuneration in human 
 affairs ; but it is an immense advance on the existing system ; 
 and if a still higher scheme is ever to be reached, it can the 
 more easily proceed from such a basis. In the meantime, the 
 nationalisation of economic rent would leave in full play all the 
 individualistic forces which would work for the fullest utilisation 
 of the land. Wherever tenants choose to undertake special 
 improvements of a durable kind, they can and indeed should be 
 
 ^ "To say the truth, all parties are agreed in pcllo upon the necessity of 
 abolishing landlordism. It is only a question of settling who shall have the 
 credit of doing it, and how it shall be managed so that neither the landlord's 
 creditors nor the public exchequer should suffer too much by that unavoidable 
 liquidation." (M. Philippe Daryl, Ireland's Disease, author's Eng. ed., 1888, 
 p. 213.) 
 
332 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 bought up by the State at a valuation. Thus there need be no 
 discouragement of any species of improvement whatever, though 
 the final property in improvements, and the right to raise rents 
 on account of these, would still vest in the State. If under this 
 system serious inequalities still arise, they will at least not take 
 the form of large estates ; while the community will still have at 
 its command the machinery of taxation of incomes. Should it 
 be found that Mr George's principle, of making the economic 
 rent the " single tax," works to the general advantage, well and 
 good ; if not, other taxation can be applied. Indeed, while the 
 State is paying off the purchase price of the landlord's rights, it 
 clearly must retain the present system of taxes. The " single 
 tax " will be possible, if ever, only when the burden of purchase 
 is cleared off. 
 
 Under a system of rent-nationalisation, it will be observed, 
 security of tenure will be carried to the highest possible point 
 without involving any risk of injury to agriculture. As rents will 
 be fixed on a regular principle, any man's inability to pay will 
 obviously mean either special misfortune on his part — which 
 would be matter of common knowledge, and so would constitute 
 a case for charitable leniency on the part of the State — or in- 
 competence. In the latter case, he will be identifiable as a 
 bungler who would have gone bankrupt if he had been the owner 
 of his farm ; and his removal will be an evident expediency. 
 
 For the rest, as the fixing of rates of rent will be a public 
 matter, like the fixing of taxes, and the proceeds will be national 
 revenue, there would be no risk under such a system of the 
 tenants cheating the State. It will be to the interest of each to 
 see that every one else pays his due. And to this end, perfect 
 publicity should be given to the whole procedure. 
 
 I 4. Promotion of Ai:;?-iciilfiirc and Industry. 
 
 In the special circumstances of Ireland, however, an Irish 
 Parliament would do well to attempt more than the maintenance 
 of agriculture at its present level. It is certain that the land 
 can support a larger population than it does, and it is to the 
 immediate interest of all to create the possibility of such main- 
 tenance. Provision can also be made, without any infringement 
 of the principle of free trade between the sections of the Federal 
 State, for the promotion of industry, the necessary complement 
 of the promotion of agriculture. Given such provision, the 
 hitherto perpetual pressure of relative over-population — a pressure 
 
EPILOGUE, 333 
 
 at work even in years of actual depopulation — would be for the 
 time relieved, and the people could be lifted to the higher standard 
 of comfort which is the first ground of security against future 
 relative excess of numbers. Over-population means simply excess 
 of persons relatively to the available resources. Let the avail- 
 able resources be speedily increased, and the over-population is 
 absorbed, with a chance of not re-appearing as such. It should 
 be a main part of the business of an Irish Parliament, then, to 
 stimulate and outstrip the " natural " growth of Irish agriculture 
 on its new footing by special means. 
 
 And it happens that both the need and the feasibility of such 
 promotion of agriculture is being freshly recognised among poli- 
 ticians of different parties. Just after the headline and first 
 paragraph of this section had been written, there appeared in the 
 Times the following item of news : — 
 
 "A noteworthy occurrence affecting Ireland is the publication of the 
 report drawn up by Mr Horace Plunket's ' Recess Committee,' which, 
 composed of men of various opinions, has been considering the wel- 
 fare of the country. This recommends the establishment of an Irish 
 Governmental Department of Agriculture and Industries. Whether 
 the suggestion be carried into effect or not, the work of the committee 
 will nevertheless be memorable, since it has achieved the rare feat of 
 bringing into practical unanimity a collection of Irishmen of all parties 
 and beliefs." 
 
 To no one was this publication ^ more noteworthy and more 
 welcome than to the present writer. It provides, from a wide 
 knowledge of the subject, and from a ripe reflection on the 
 practical problem, a demonstration of the need for and the 
 feasibility of a State promotion of agriculture and industry in 
 Ireland, where he had been about to undertake the thesis with 
 extremely imperfect qualifications, mainly on lines of economic 
 theory and analogy. It is now, happily, unnecessary to do more 
 than refer to the Report in question as a perfect store-house of 
 information and argument, to summarise its proposals, and to 
 point to its political significance. It is first of all to be remarked 
 that the proposal for a State Department of Agriculture and 
 Industries follows upon a movement, begun a few years ago by 
 Mr Horace Plunket, for the development of cooperative methods 
 among Irish farmers, which has already led to great improvement 
 
 ^ Report of the Recess Coniiiiittee on the Estahlishinent of a Department of 
 Agriculture a)iii Industries for Ireland. Dublin: Browne & Nolan. Belfast: 
 Mullan & Son. London : Fisher Unwin. Price is. 
 
334 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 in Irish dairy produce.^ Thus it is from an organisation with 
 the best means of knowing what can be done by private initiative 
 that we have the weightiest plea yet made for State aid to industry 
 in Ireland. 
 
 Taking agriculture to begin with, we find the Recess Com- 
 mittee proposing to promote (a) normal agriculture by means 
 of a system of Travelling Instructors, Experiment Stations, and 
 Agricultural Laboratories, all of which may be applied in con- 
 nection with and furtherance of the movement of cooperation 
 now being guided by the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society ; 
 and (^) a variety of other field and cottage industries in which 
 instruction could be given by the same means. In this connec- 
 tion it is to be specially noted that attempts were actually made 
 in Ireland in the last generation (1838-1848) to improve agri- 
 culture by means of model farms and travelling teachers ; and 
 that the effort was frustrated by the opposition of the English 
 Treasury, which then stood for the principle of unqualified 
 laissez-faire, then the ruling economic doctrine in England. 
 Thus, after ages of direct oppression of Ireland, involving the 
 deliberate destruction of her industries, England in the name 
 of Liberalism blindly wrought her fresh injury by refusing to 
 permit of the special measures needed to counteract the results 
 of the wrong-doing of the past. At every step, it would seem, 
 the English hold on Ireland must needs prove a curse, ignorance 
 continuing to do evil even when the will to do it has ceased. 
 And it may here be said that, though the Recess Committee's 
 Report carefully abstains from suggesting anything like State 
 control of the land, it points to the need and possibility of 
 developing certain Irish resources which are not likely to be 
 greatly developed save under State auspices, seeing that to do so 
 means competition with the State-aided output of other countries. 
 These resources are mainly : — 
 
 1. The improvement of the existing flax-culture. 
 
 2. Creation of beetroot-culture and tobacco-culture. 
 
 3. Improvement of pig-breeding and rearing. 
 
 4. Substitution of a dead-meat trade for the cruel and wasteful 
 
 transport of live cattle. 
 
 5. Promotion of the poultry and egg trade by improved means 
 
 of transit. 
 
 6. Promotion of market-gardening by horticultural schools, and 
 
 by rewards. 
 
 ^ For a sketch of this movement see the article llic New Irish Movement, 
 by Mr Standish O'Grady, in the Ne7v Review, December, 1896. 
 
EPILOGUE. 335 
 
 7. Reforesting and reclamation of waste lands. 
 
 8. Development of the sea fisheries, of oyster culture, and of 
 
 inland fisheries. 
 
 9. Utilisation of water power, so abundant in Ireland. 
 
 In regard to every one of these items it may be affirmed that a 
 Home Rule Government, with a national land system, could and 
 probably would do far more than is likely to be done in the 
 imaginable future by a Ministry of Agriculture and Industries 
 under English auspices. The English and Scotch unprepared- 
 ness for State aid to industry is so great that nearly all of the 
 small existing schemes, such as stations for fish culture, are re- 
 garded with disfavour by many members of Parliament. Foreign 
 competition, indeed, is goading the commercial class out of its 
 laissez-faire into a more and more emphatic demand for the 
 extension and improvement of technical schools ; but this very 
 fact is a warning that, under English auspices, Irish technical 
 instruction would be kept relatively backward, when it is press- 
 ingly important that it should be as efficient as possible. On 
 technical instruction would largely depend that development of 
 (id) Cottage Industries which is so necessary in agricultural 
 Ireland, where there are only some 240 days in the year in 
 which a man can work upon the land. Such industries have 
 been developed to a wonderful extent in Wiirtemberg, by a 
 method of productive technical instruction under State manage- 
 ment. But who believes that an English Department would in 
 the near future develop industry as has been done by the Govern- 
 ment of Wiirtemberg ? 
 
 So with the development of the dead-meat trade, and of the 
 poultry and egg trade. In regard to the former the Report 
 observes ^ that " The difficulties in the way of organising this trade 
 will be less formidable when the country is more in conwiand of its 
 means of transport, by land and sea." Now, there is very little 
 prospect of any great development of Irish means of transport 
 by land and sea save through a measure of either nationalisation 
 or State subsidisation of the railways, so as to bring about their 
 unification. The need for such unification has long been felt ; 
 but nothing short of a gigantic Syndicate can bring it about 
 without State interference ; and a State does ill to encourage 
 gigantic Syndicates. Were Home Rule established, on the other 
 hand, a measure of railway nationalisation could be carried far 
 sooner than we are likely to carry any measure of the kind in 
 England. As regards sea transport, again, there might very well 
 
 1 r. 19. 
 
336 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 be enough influx of capital under Home Rule to establish by 
 private enterprise the shipping needed ; but here again provision 
 could be made against future industrial difficulties by setting up 
 such a system of State shipping as exists in Norway, the profits 
 of which would go into the public treasury. 
 
 Finally, as regards reforesting, reclamation of waste lands, and 
 development of the culture of flax, beetroot, and tobacco, it is 
 abundantly clear that English control is so much sheer hindrance 
 to progress, as compared with the possibilities of advance under 
 Home Rule, especially under an ideal of land-nationalisation. 
 English public opinion is not within measurable distance of such 
 measures of land reclamation as have been carried out in the 
 French landes and in the shallow waters of Holland ; whereas 
 a Home Rule Government would readily follow such leads, and 
 would not defer to English prejudice and precedent. English 
 supervision would represent all the inertia of English habit — the 
 habit of industrial laissez-fah-e in a country where laissez-faire 
 could for a time work with special facility by reason of the 
 historic and natural conditions, differing as they do so profoundly 
 from those of Ireland. It is further morally certain that a mere 
 Department of Agriculture and Industries under English auspices 
 would be hampered at every turn by the jealousies of English 
 parties. Conservatives would tend to oppose every grant made 
 by a Liberal Ministry ; though their leaders when in power might 
 propose larger grants ; and Liberal human nature would hardly 
 be equal to helping Conservatives to reap a harvest of credit in 
 such circumstances. Only a Home Rule Government could 
 have the necessary financial freedom. And that the financial 
 problem could be best handled in Ireland is finally made clear 
 by the virtual admission of the Financial Relations Committee,^ 
 in its recently published report, to the effect that after all the 
 denials of Liberal and Conservative financiers in turn, Ireland 
 has since the Union been heavily overtaxed. It has taken 
 generations to bring us to this admission. Now that it is made, 
 it should surely be followed by the national admission that Irish- 
 men had better be left to manage Irish affairs. 
 
 In this connection, it only remains to point out that all the 
 possible forms of progress indicated in the Recess Committee's 
 Report, however beneficial they might be in the near future if 
 conducted on an individualistic basis, would in course of time 
 develop for Ireland on a larger scale the ultimate social problem. 
 
 ' See this summarised in the article Tlic Financial Grievances of Ireland^ 
 by Mr J. J. Clancy in the Nineteenth Century, December, 1896. 
 
EPILOGUE. T^T^y 
 
 All forms of individualistic improvement whatever tend in time 
 to come under the control of capitalism ; and supposing Ireland 
 in the next twenty years to make the most satisfactory progress 
 in agriculture by means of cooperative methods, and in industry 
 by means of systematic technical instruction, it is reasonable to 
 surmise that in twenty years more the gains would be seen in 
 process of being turned to the advantage of invested capital, 
 which could soon compete triumphantly with the cooperation 
 of small farmers and small producers. Then would arise on a 
 wider scale than before the old strife of capital and labour, grown 
 all the bitterer by reason of the new growth of wealth and the 
 past growth of well-being. There is no evading this law of 
 industrial evolution save by controlling the conditions under 
 which it comes into play. Hence the profound importance of 
 providing for Ireland now in the spirit of statesmanlike foresight, 
 rather than in that of simple opportunism. The Recess Com- 
 mittee are not at all to be censured for adapting their demonstra- 
 tion to the prevailing poUtical ideas. Indeed the special value 
 of their Report lies in the fact that it represents an appeal to no 
 faction whatever, but sets forth what needs to be done and what 
 can be done in Ireland irrespective of the assumptions and ideals 
 of either Home Rulers or Unionists. But when their part is 
 done, and admirably done, it remains for political students to 
 take into account all the factors in the problem, and to scheme 
 for Ireland accordingly. 
 
 It is, indeed, an obvious matter for the consideration of 
 practical politicians that if capital has been withheld from Ireland 
 in the past on the score of her political unrest, it will tend in the 
 future, under the same auspices, to be withheld on the same 
 ground. The Irish Americans are not likely to pour in capital 
 while the English ascendancy subsists ; and English capitalists 
 are not likely to come freely forward in the face of a continued 
 struggle for Home Rule. And the struggle for Home Rule will 
 surely continue. It has now become something of an axiom that 
 a political aspiration once aroused in a nation is not likely to die 
 of prosperity, though prosperity may weaken or end movements 
 arising from temporary industrial distress. Therefore whatever 
 gain may accrue to the spread of cooperative agricultural methods 
 in Ireland will in itself, in all probability, tend to the strengthen- 
 ing of the Home Rule cause. Everything points to that central 
 principle. 
 
338 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 § 5. Education and Religion. 
 
 It remains to consider the most thorny of all the problems of 
 Irish administration — that of the course to be taken with the 
 Churches, whose action and attitude on education constitute the 
 special difficulty of that case. It is not at all likely that the sug- 
 gestions here made will be acceptable to either the English or 
 the Irish majority ; and they are thrown out rather by way of 
 completing the outline of a rational program than with the hope 
 of seeing them adopted. For religion in Ireland is a twofold 
 force of hindrance, inasmuch as it sunders men who would other- 
 wise readily agree on a political solution, and further prevents 
 agreement on any plan for the sorely needed schooling of the 
 mass of the people. It is safe to say that all nations are under- 
 educated ; but Ireland is to-day under-educated relatively to 
 other countries,^ inasmuch as the claims of the Catholic Church 
 and the jealousy of Protestantism concur to prevent an effective 
 system of State education. Even in England, the feud of Church 
 and Nonconformity is a constant danger to popular education : 
 in Ireland it is a standing obstacle. It is true that the school 
 attendance and the number of schools latterly increase, despite 
 the decline in population ; - but though the annual grants to 
 primary schools are proportionally greater for Ireland than for 
 England and Scotland,"^ the results were certainly not better. 
 For much of this backwardness the blame has properly lain, in 
 the near past, with the Irish Education Board, which carefully 
 made the schools anti-national;* but whatever be the causes, 
 
 ^ In London in 1 891 the proportion of men who signed the marriage register 
 with marks was 37 per cent. ; and of women, 5 per cent. In Ireland in 1890 
 the proportion was 20*4 men and 20'9 women. This represented progress since 
 1874, when the figures were : 30'i men and 364 women. 
 
 - In 1886 there were 8,024 elementary schools under the Education Com- 
 missioners, with 490,484 scholars : in 1891 there were 8,346 schools, with 
 506,336 scholars. In 1834 there were only 789 national schools, with 107,042 
 scholars. In 1859, with a population of about 5,800,000 there were 5,496 
 schools, with a nominal attendance of 806,510. But at that time the whole 
 number on the registers was taken. The average attendance would be 
 about 600,000. 
 
 " The grants for 1892 were : England, ^3,498,078 ; Scotland, ;i^546,997 ; 
 Ireland ^969,853. It is to be noted, however, that Ireland is relatively very 
 poor in other endowments. The elementary schools in England in 1 891 
 received from rates, fees, donations, and other sources, ^4,480,162; those of 
 Scotland, ^^654,036, and those of Ireland 128,637. 
 
 •* See Mr Fox's Key to the Irish Qiics/ioit, pp. 186-187. See also above, 
 p. 174; and compare i^/<p£/tr« Ireland, by an Ulsterman, 1868, pp. 271-303, as 
 
EPILOGUE. 339 
 
 the fact is that to-day the Irish people, though constantly spoken 
 of as anxious for education, possesses relatively little, and is, 
 as above noted, little given to reading, even in its own history. 
 This holds true of the Protestant and Catholic populations alike: 
 indeed, if both sides really studied their history instead of living 
 on garbled and envenomed traditions, the religious bitterness 
 could not subsist as it does. While it remains, however, it seems 
 to make impossible even such a compromise on religious educa- 
 tion as has subsisted in the Board Schools of England. Catholics 
 will accept neither simple Bible-reading in the schools nor simple 
 secular teaching : Protestants of course will tolerate neither 
 Catholic nor secular teaching. The minds of the children are 
 made the battleground of the fanaticisms of their parents, priests, 
 and presbyters. For the time being, there exists a working com- 
 promise of a very peculiar kind, which might even suggest, when 
 separately considered, a possible disappearance of the religious 
 difficulty, as regards the schools. In the schools under the 
 National Board of Education, religious instruction is given for 
 one hour each day, and the nature of the teaching varies accord- 
 ing as Catholics or Protestants preponderate in the district. For 
 each school the Board appoints a Patron, who may be either a 
 private individual, such as the landlord of the property, or a school 
 committee ; and the Patron in turn, if an individual, may either 
 act directly as school manager or appoint a local correspondent 
 as is done in the case of a committee. If the Catholics are in the 
 majority in the district, the Patron is Catholic and the religious 
 teaching is Catholic ; and vice versa ; the pupils belonging to the 
 minority-sect being withdrawn from religious teaching. This state 
 of things prevails in the case of all schools under the Board which 
 were built and are still retained by denominations, and in the 
 other " non-vested " schools belonging to localities. In the 
 " vested " schools, on the other hand (those built by Govern- 
 ment grant) the local clergy of each denomination are entitled to 
 have access to the pupils of their creed during the hour for 
 religious instruction ; but in these also the tendency seems to be 
 that Protestants and Catholics aggregate in different schools. 
 
 This arrangement, though it must in a number of cases ex- 
 clude children of both sects from all religious teaching, seems to 
 give sufficient satisfaction to permit of its continuance ; but it is 
 difficult to see in it a tolerable permanent solution. The segrega- 
 te the ofticial ireatmenl of O'Curry ; and Gustave de Beaumont, U Irlandc, 
 7^ edit., i. 319-320, as to the distrust established in the past by Prolestant 
 proselytism. 
 
340 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 tion of children everywhere into virtually denominational schools 
 is in itself very undesirable from the point of view of good 
 citizenship ; and seems to promise an endless stimulation of the 
 sectarian spirit in the future. It is hard to see a practicable way 
 out of such a deadlock ; but on the whole the best plan seems to 
 be the extension to all schools alike of the system in use in the 
 vested schools. It is bad enough that the different clergy should 
 have to get leave to teach the children of their flocks different 
 creeds for one hour a day ; but it seems better that this should be 
 so than that each school as a whole should be under the control of 
 either a Catholic or a Protestant as such. Already the National 
 Schools are so far unsectarian in principle that they are all open 
 to children of all creeds. It remains to establish all round an 
 unsectarian management ; and to this end a Home Rule Govern- 
 ment would do well to establish for the schools in general the 
 system of control now applied to the " Model " Schools of the 
 Education Commissioners, which are managed by the Inspectors 
 for the districts in which they are situated. On such a footing it 
 may be possible to raise education above the level at which rural 
 use and wont would fix it, and to set against the religious tradi- 
 tion of separateness the civic example of unsectarianism. There 
 would still remain, of course, the problem of the specifically 
 sectarian schools, which would present in Ireland the same 
 difficulties as it does in England. For these it is difficult to see 
 any ultimate solution save that of the State taking over the whole 
 burden of maintenance, paying to the previous owners a sum 
 down for their property, and guaranteeing to the sects concerned 
 the same right to teach their dogmas for one hour a day as is 
 given in the other national schools. 
 
 Under such a system, the clergy of all denominations would 
 be in a certain indirect way servants of the State ; and it would 
 be hard to suggest a better palliative for the present antagonisms 
 of the sects than the frank adoption of the French plan of a 
 Budget of Cults, under which the clergy of all sects possessed of 
 a certain minimum of registered adherents should receive a fixed 
 stipend from the State, which in turn ought either to receive, 
 under one or other of its departments, all fees for burials, 
 marriages, and christenings, or to enact that these functions be 
 performed gratuitously for all citizens who desire it. Here, of 
 course, there is the maximum of unlikelihood that the proposed 
 solution will be adopted. Once upon a time the Catholic clergy 
 were grateful for the proposal that they should be salaried by the 
 State. To-day, in view of the small stipend that the State must 
 
EPILOGUE. 341 
 
 needs fix if it gave any, they would perhaps look askance, even if 
 the Protestants consented to an all-round arrangement; while even 
 if the Churchmen agreed, rationalists — few as they are in Ireland — 
 might protest. To the latter, the present writer would say that in 
 France the system of State payment all round seems to restrict the 
 political power of the priest more than would any other arrange- 
 ment. This, of course, is not a recommendation of it to the priests 
 of other countries ; but those in Ireland may even now reflect that 
 unless Ireland is to remain a complete exception to the ordinary 
 course of intellectual development in Europe, their successors of 
 a generation hence may be glad to get from the State a moderate 
 stipend, while the State may then see much less reason than now 
 for granting it. The Irish clergy of to-day have been described 
 by an impartial foreigner as " a corporation greatly enamoured of 
 its comforts, endowed with good incomes, and whose sleekness 
 forms a striking contrast with the general emaciation of their 
 parishioners." '^ It seems possible that when the parishioners 
 grow less emaciated the priests may grow a little more so. At 
 present they are increasing in numbers while the population 
 decreases ; and doubtless their incomes are on the increase also. 
 "It is generally admitted," says M. Daryl, "that each of these 
 priests, with his church and his house, cannot cost much under 
 ;^3oo or ;^4oo a year. That would give about ^1,200,000 
 coming annually from the pockets of those labourers and servant 
 girls. T/ie tithe was never so heavy."- An outsider may take 
 leave to predict that a prosperous and educated Ireland will not 
 go on paying its priests as a battling and starving and one-idea'd 
 Ireland has of late done those who helped to organise its agrarian 
 and constitutional struggle for self rule. It is probable that the 
 " British majority " will see fit, in any Federal constitution it may 
 accept, to insist on the veto against all religious endowments, 
 preferring to count on the decline of Catholicism from the sjircad 
 of culture, without considering whether Protestantism is not 
 equally likely to decline in Britain, as it has done in Germany. 
 Meantime, clerical incomes are just as much a drain on the total 
 resources of the community as they would be if paid directly by 
 the State ; and they will probably increase before they decrease. 
 Hence the expediency, in the eye of sociological reason, of an 
 arrangement under which the burden will tend to be minimised, 
 while yet preventing that state of impoverishment on the part of 
 the clergy which would tend to make them specially active for a 
 
 ' Daryl, Irelainr s Disease, as cited, p. 220. 
 - /<:/., p. 229. 
 
342 THE SAXON AND THE CELT. 
 
 revival of fanaticism. It is the bare historic fact that rehgion 
 has wrought more evil in Ireland than in any country in northern 
 Europe. The more reason, theoretically speaking, why Ireland 
 should in her own interests attempt the control of religion. But 
 we have, of course, religion itself to reckon with, and that will 
 doubtless long avail to ward off a reasonable solution of its own 
 problem. 
 
I N D E X. 
 
 " Accidents," political, 105 
 Adelung, cited, 66, note 
 Aestyii, 61-62 
 Afghans, blond, 35 
 Agriculture, Irish, 162, 164, 
 
 25S-261, 308, 329-337 
 Albigenses, 94 
 Albinoism, 34-37. 39 
 Allen, Grant, xii, 38, note, 
 
 92, note, 212, note 
 America and Ireland, 170, 
 
 289, 317, 337 
 American nationalism, 119- 
 
 122 
 
 Anglo-Saxon history, 85-88, 
 223-228 
 
 skull-types, 38, note, 
 
 note 
 Anthropometry, 34 
 Aquitanians, 49, 81, 83 
 Argyll, Duke of, 1 32, note, 
 
 142, note, 234-264 
 Ariovistus, So 
 Aristotle, 77 
 Arminius, 81, i93> 250 
 Armoricans, 64 
 Arthurian legend, 90, 233 
 Aryan race, 30-43, 62, 66, 
 
 114 
 
 ■ cradles of, 33 
 
 Asia, blonds in, 35 
 Athaulf, 84 
 Auvergnats, 68 
 
 B 
 
 Baker, Sir S., cited, 106 
 Balfour, A. J., 305-320 
 Bards, 128, 131 
 Barneveldt, 250 
 Barrows, 68, 108 
 Basques, 61, note, 68 
 
 169-170, 
 
 79, note., 
 183, 1S5, 
 120, 121- 
 134, 206, 
 108, 109, 
 
 133, note, 
 
 note, 106 
 
 Baur, F. C, 196 
 Beaconsfield, 7, 283, note 
 Beaumont, G. de, xvi, 139, note, 17b- 
 
 180 
 Beddoe, Dr, cited, 69, note, 126. 
 Belesama, 73, note 
 
 Belfast, bigotry in, 276 
 
 Belgae, 48, 59, 60 
 
 Belgians, 93, 96- 
 
 Belloguet, Roget de, 50, note, 51, 
 102, note 
 
 Berserker-rage, 102 
 ' Bertrand, a., 52, 59, 68, note 
 
 Bible in England, 145 
 
 Bismarck, 270 
 i Blond races, 27, 32, 35, 39. 4i. 49. 
 
 51, 56, 82, 102, no, 126 
 1 Blumenbach, 36, note 
 
 Boar, symbol of, 62 
 
 1 Bodichon, Dr, 19. "'"'''. 83. '"^'^ 
 
 BONAR, J., 170, note 
 
 I Boniface, cited, 85, note 
 
 I Borderers, Scotch, 211, 213 
 
 I Bounties on grain, 171 
 
 BOUVERIE-FUSEY, Cited, 167 
 
 Brachycephalism, 37-43. ^7. 6b, 69, 
 
 92-97, 108 
 Breton temperament, 14 
 
 race, 49, 161, note 
 
 Brian Boru, 247 
 Bright, John, 186, 241 
 Broca, 34, note, 40, note, 42, 70 ^ 
 Britain, races of, 43. 49. 54-57. "2, 73, 
 206, 224-225. 228, 239 
 
 name of, 66 
 
 Bruce, 246, 253 
 
 Bryant, Dr S., 68, note 
 Brythouic Celts, 66, 67, note, 7j. 
 note 
 
 Buckle, 99101 
 
 Bull, J. T., cited, 139, "otes 
 
 Burial, modes of, 66-68 
 
 Burke, ix, 165, 254, 263, 275 
 
 Burns, 219 
 
 Burton, J. Hill, 205-220, 234, 290- 
 
 291 
 
 343 
 
344 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 C€SAR, 48, 50, 53, 54-55, 08, 72, 
 
 76, 82 
 Caledonians, 55-56, 64, 69 
 Calvin, 95, 204 
 Carlyle, S, 26, 65, 154, 269 
 Cassiterides, the, 31, note, 73, note 
 Castle, Dublin, 172 
 Catholicism, 92-97, 159, 184-185, 192. 
 
 24S, 256, 262, 277, 287 
 Catti, 79 
 Celtica, 46, 60 
 Celtic languages, 45, 48, 5S-59, 129, 
 
 216 
 
 literature, 90, 127-131 
 
 types, 42, 49, 56, 59, 107 
 
 history, 72-109, 191 
 
 character, 54, 74-77, 88, 93-97, 
 
 190-204, 221-233, 265293 
 
 " Renaissance," 1 14, note 
 
 " Celts," evolution of, 38 
 
 naming of, 43-71 
 
 15rythonic and Goidelic, 62, 66, 
 
 67, 73 
 
 Scottish, 10, 83 
 
 as sailors, i&i, note 
 
 Celto-Iberians, 49 
 
 Celtophobia, 2-5, 6, 8-14, 49, 54, So, 
 
 129, 205-220 
 Chamberlain, J., 7, 2S5, 319 
 Charles I., 153 
 Chastity, barbaric, 79, 107 
 Chaucer, 90, 141 
 Chichester, Sir A., 151-152 
 China, blonds in, 35 
 Christianity and race-character, 74-75, 
 
 93, no, 131-132, 227-230, 309-311 
 Cimbri, 57-58 
 Cimmerians, 57 
 Civilisation, nature of, vi, 89, 128, 
 
 132, 244 
 Claxricarde, Lady, 242 
 Clans, characteristics of, 69, note, 82 
 Cleveland, President, 1S5 
 Coal in Ireland, 170, 242 
 Coercion Acts, 168 
 Colonization, 105-106 
 Commerce, Irish and English, 160-167 
 Communes, origin of, 92 
 Confiscations, Irish, 153, 247, 253-255 
 CONRiNc;, 36, note 
 Conservative party, viii-x, 12 
 CoNWAV, Moncure D., 184 
 Cornish religion, 94 
 Corsicans, 68 
 Cox, 161, note 
 
 Crawford, F. M., 122 
 Cremation, 67 
 
 Crime, Irish and English, 274 
 Cromwell, sons of, 105 
 
 in Ireland, 155-156, 256 
 
 Curia, 92 
 CuRTius, 14, 7iote 
 
 D 
 
 Danes, 68, 69, note, 71 
 
 in England, 89, 223-226 
 
 in Ireland, 132-133, 137.307. 3" 
 
 Dark races, 27, 40, 43, 49, 56, 59, 69, 
 
 81 
 Daryl, r., 331, 341 
 Darwin, 32 
 Davies, Sir John, 136, 15S, 166, 245, 
 
 250, 252 
 Decadence in races, iic-iii 
 Desmond, 145 
 Devoti, 83 
 
 Dicey, Prof. A. V., 3-4 
 DiLKE, Sir C, xvii, 186 
 
 DiODORUS SiCULUS, 46 
 
 Dion Cassius, 46 
 Discord and progress, 292 
 Dolichocephalism, 37-43, 67, note, 68, 
 
 69, 92-97, 108 
 Dolmens, 67 
 Dougal, name, 69, note 
 Drogheda, sack of, 155, note 
 Druids, 50, 52, 72-74 
 Drunkenness, Clerman, 80, 107 
 Dutch, xvii, 93 
 culture, 96 
 
 E 
 
 Ekerweck, Dr, 98, notes, 103, note 
 Eddas, the, 130-131, 207-208 
 Eden, legend of, 31 
 Education in Ireland, 174, 338 
 Eisteddfod, The, 117, 126, note 
 Eliot, Georc.e, 112, 114, note 
 Elizabeth, 252 
 Embalmment, 67, note 
 Emigration, Irish, 165, 167, 171, 260 
 Emotion, 115 
 England, races of, 71 
 
 and Ireland, 131 
 
 English character, 5-13, 265 
 
 history, 89-91, 199, 230-232, 251- 
 
 252 
 
 skull types, 97 
 
INDEX. 
 
 345 
 
 English colonisation, io6 
 
 politics, 1 20, 189 
 
 stocks in Ireland, 157, 166 
 
 Eric, the, 315 
 
 Ethic of race instinct, 1 14-124 
 Ethnagogue, method of, 23S 
 Ethnology, definition of, 31 
 Etymologies, 53, 63-66 
 European ojiinion on Ireland, 177-1S5 
 Evans, A. E., cited, 23, 26, note 
 Eyre, Colonel, 297 
 
 Faces, racial, 37, note 
 
 " Failures," national, 19S 
 
 Falkland, Lord, 153 
 
 Famines in Ireland, 164, 16S, 173 
 
 Federalism, 184, 285-2S8, 321-329 
 
 Federation, imperial, 184 
 
 Fenianism, 168, 176, 187 
 
 Fife, people of, 212 
 
 Fir-bolgs, 65 
 
 Fitzgerald, 146 
 
 Fitzwilliam, 1 50-1 51 
 
 FOURNIER, Prof., V, 181 
 
 France, history of, 15, 85, 92-96, 99- 
 
 loi, 105-175 
 Reformation in, 9596, 144 
 
 peasantry of, 185 
 
 [See " French"] 
 Frederick the Great, 15, 26 
 
 Second, 92 
 
 I'reeman, 116, 205 
 Free Trade, 258-261 
 
 French and Germans, 1428, 103, 119 
 
 123, 193 
 French character, 8, 99-106, 271 
 
 frugality, 14 
 
 colonisation, 105- 106 
 
 self-criticism, 19-20 
 
 types, 42, notes 
 
 politics, loo-ioi 
 
 Revolution, 262 
 
 Froude, 9, 148, 152, 294-304 
 Fustel de Coulangks, 1920, 23-26 
 
 G 
 
 Gaels, 56, 205-220 
 
 Galatac, 46-47, 54-55> 57. 67, note, 
 
 note, 270 
 Galen, 55, iiotc 
 Gall, meaning of, 43, 64 
 Gallic language, 50 
 
 Gardiner, Prof., 152, 159, note 
 Gauls, pedigree (jf, 15 
 
 naming of, 43-71 
 
 physique t)f, 49 
 
 civilisation of, 72, 85, 88, 127, 
 
 191 
 
 character of, 72-78, 88, 190-204 
 
 Gavelkind, 309, 313 
 
 George, Henry, 318, 332. 
 
 Gerald de Barri, 90 
 
 German character, 16, 22, 75, 77, 103, 
 
 107, 191, 192, 193, 195-196, 200, 
 
 23-24, 83, 85, 91, 
 192 
 >5, 99, 127-129, 192, 
 
 223 
 
 civilization, 
 
 98, 128 
 
 superstition 
 
 — -— . name, 65 
 literature, 
 
 195-196 
 
 race, 29, 55, 61-63, 65-66 
 
 ■ race-prejudice, 13-28 
 
 history, 77-99. I75' I93 '94 
 
 Bund, 98, note 
 
 Gennania, 46, 60 
 
 Germany, blond and dark in, 34 
 
 — — unification of, 98 
 
 Protestantism in, 92-97, \\\ 
 
 (Jieserrecht, 18-19 
 
 Gildas, 239 
 
 Gladstone, 2, 7, 71, 177, 234-239 
 
 Goethe, 99, note, 112, no'e 
 
 Goidclic Celts, 66, 67, note, 73, note 
 
 Goldsmith, 201 
 
 Goths, 57, 65, 80, note, 84 
 
 Gothini, 61 
 
 (Iray, Lord, 146 
 
 (second Deputy) 147-148 
 
 Greeks, naming of, 44 
 
 strifes of, 307 
 
 Green, J. R., 85, 89, 116, 221-233 
 Greene, J. B., cited, 174, 175 
 Grey, Earl, 177 
 
 Guelfs and Ghihellincs, 91, 95, note 
 Guilds, 92 
 
 II 
 
 Haeckel, 32 
 Hamkrton, p. G., 8 
 Hamilton, John, 290 
 IIartmann, R., cited, 32, note 
 Hassencamp, 139, note, 159, note, 
 
 183 
 IIaycuaft, Prof., 109, n.ite 
 Hebrides, types in, 57, 209, 215, 291 
 Hegei., 25, note 
 
146 
 
 INDKX. 
 
 Helvetians, 60 
 Henry H., 138 
 
 VHI., 94, 142-143. 244, 253 
 
 Heredity, 173 
 
 Herodotus, 44 
 
 Highlanders, Scotch, S3, 96, 205-220, 
 
 291 
 Hippocrates, 35 
 History, writing of, 25, 233 
 HoLTZMANX, 20, 23, note, 51, note, 
 
 53, 7iote, 65, note 
 Home Rule, 1-13, 169-172, 174-176, 
 
 184-188, 265-304, iz\-isi,2 
 HowELLS, \V. D., 122 
 Huguenots, 94, 95, 97 
 Hume, 160 
 
 Humours, theory of, 16-17 
 Huns, 85 
 
 Hunting races, 107 
 Hutchinson, Hei.v, 161, note 
 Huxley, 71 
 
 I 
 
 Iberians, 49, 66, 67, note, 68, 81, loS 
 
 of Asia Minor, 72 
 
 Ibsen, 102 
 
 Industry, Irish, 145, 161-172, 259-261, 
 
 279, 332-337 
 Instinct of race, I14-124 
 Ireland, structure of, 134-135, 161, 
 
 note 
 
 policy for, 164-166, 169-171 
 
 races of, 124-127, 137, 195 
 
 foreign views of, 177-189, 191-195 
 
 Protestantism in, 93, 143-147 
 
 Christianity in, 131-133 
 
 Irish character, I-7, 89, 104, 157-160, 
 
 173, 197-204, 265-293, 297-304 
 
 civilisation, 127-176, 22S, 311 
 
 types, 69, 124-127 
 
 in America, 89, 186-188 
 
 Nationalist party, 9, II-I2, 71, 
 
 note, II 6- II 7 
 
 church, 132-133, 228-230, 312 
 
 history, 124-189, 194-195, 237- 
 
 264, 305-320 
 
 literature, 127-132, 174 
 
 as sailors, 161- 162, note 
 
 and Romans, 240 
 
 finance, 336 
 
 Islam, 74 
 
 Italian character, 13 
 
 Italy, Oermans in, 84-85, 91-92 
 
 Reformation in, 95, 143 
 
 religion in, 96 
 
 J 
 
 Japanese art, 37, note 
 
 Jews, 1 14-1 14 
 
 Jur.AiNViLLK, D'Arbois de, 44, note, 
 
 64, note, 127, note 
 Julian, cited, 79, note 
 
 Kelte race, 35 
 Kelts. See " Celts." 
 KiLDAP.E, Earl of, 145 
 Kilkenny, .Statute of, 139-140 
 KiNGSLEY, C. , 80, note, 107, note 
 Kipling, Rudvard, 6, 9-10, 271 
 Kymry, 49, 57 
 
 Laissez-faire, 164, note 
 
 Land-problem, Irish, 329-337 
 
 Lang, A., 9 
 
 Language and race, 29, 32, 59, 63 
 
 " Lappanoids," 68 
 
 " Latin races," 14, 27, 68 
 
 La Tour d'Auvergne, 17 
 
 Lavergne, cited, 170 
 
 Lecky, vii-ix, 71, 172 
 
 Leland, 139, note 
 
 Lessing, 16 
 
 LiGHTFOOT, Bishop, 47, 270-271 
 
 Ligurians, 49, 68 
 
 LlTTRK, 128-129 
 
 Lord-Lieutenanis of Ireland, 13S 
 Lowell. J. R., 128-129, '92 
 Luther, 95, 112, note, 204 
 
 M 
 
 MacCakthy, J. G., 4 
 MacFirbis, 60 
 McGuiRE, 273 
 McLennan, J. F., 307-316 
 Mahaffy, Prof., cited, 107 
 Maine, Sir H. S., viii, 306 
 Malby, Sir N., 149 
 Marriages, Irish, 166, 170, note 
 Massacres, English and Turkish, 148, 
 
 181 
 Maupertuis, 16 
 Mereoith, x-xi, 38, note 
 Merovingians, 85 
 
INDEX. 
 
 347 
 
 Methodism, 93, 94, 96 I 
 
 Mill, J, S., 4, loi, 168, 169, 173, [ 
 
 note, 176 I 
 
 MoiRA, I^ord, 262 
 Moke, cited, 73, note 
 MoMMSEN, 25-26, 161, note, 190-196, 
 
 269 
 Monogamy, 79, note 
 Montesquieu, 15, 177 
 montale.mbert, 1 78 
 MoNTF-ORT, Simon de, 90 
 MouNTjOY, Lord, 151 
 Morocco, blonds in, 35 
 Mozart, 201 
 Mi LLER, Max, 30, note 
 
 K. O., 196 
 
 Munster, harrying of, 147- 149 
 Music, Irish and other, 197, 201 
 
 N 
 
 Names, clues from, 71, 167, note 
 Napoleon, 68, 155 
 National character, v-xix, 101-114 
 Navigation Act, 161 
 Newenham, 166, )iote 
 Nimes, 96 
 Noire, 22, note 
 
 Norman civilization, 89, 135, 136, 203 
 NoTT and Gliddon, 27-28, note, 104, 
 note 
 
 O 
 
 o'connei.l, 178 
 O'Neill, IIuc.h, 151 
 
 Shane, 252 
 
 Oi'i'ERT, cited, 32. 
 
 Organization, faculty for, 77-78, 84, 
 
 87, 91. 92, 97, loi, 193. 198 
 Ormond, 162 
 Ossian, 218 
 Over-population, 165-166 
 
 Paine, in 
 Pale, the, 137, 314 
 Panama Scandal, 318 
 Paris, university of, 92 
 
 religion in, 96 
 
 Paris, Gaston, 64 
 
 Parnell, 4, 7, 10, 13, 188, 275 
 
 Parsees, 67 
 
 Parties, English, 6-7 
 
 Paul, 47 
 
 Payne, Robert, 158 
 
 Penka, 35, note, 39, note, 56, 95, note, 
 
 125, note 
 Perraud, 178 
 Perrot, 149-150 
 Petrarch, 8 
 Petty, 163, note 
 
 Phoenicians, 73 ^ 
 
 Phrenology, 108, note, 109, note 
 Picts, 55-56 
 
 Place-names in England, 82 
 Plutarch, cited, 83 
 Poesche, 32, note, 34-38, 40, 79, tiote, 
 
 95, note, 107, no, 112, 126 
 Poet-Laureate, The, n 
 PoLYBius, 47, 52, 59, 75, tiote 
 Poynings, Statute of, 141-142 
 Pressense, Francis de, 182 
 Priesthoods, 72-75, 95, 191, 193, 262, 
 
 338-342 
 Private war, 98, 142. 
 Protectionism, 258-261 
 Protestantism, 92-97, 199, 203, 257, 
 
 287 
 Prussia, peasantry of, 179, 185 
 Puritanism, in 
 in Ireland, 160 
 
 Quatrekages, i\L de, 38, note, 61, 
 note 
 
 Race origins, 29-71 
 
 mixtures, t,t„ 49, 55, 66, 71, 125 
 
 Ranke, J., 39, note 
 
 L., 28 
 
 Raumer, von, 178-180, 182183, 195 
 Rebellions, Irish, 154, 167 
 " Recess Committee," 333-337 
 Reformation, The, 92-97, 143-147, 
 
 203-204 
 Reinacii, S., 31, note 
 Religion, provision for, 179, 33S-342 
 racial, 92-97, 143-147, I99, 203- 
 
 204, 291 
 Rhys, Prof., 62, 66, 67, note, -J^, note 
 RiCARDO, 213, 220 
 Richey, 60, note, 125126, note, 134- 
 
 135, note, 174, 196-204 
 RciiERTS, General, 276 
 Robin, M., 123, note 
 Roger, J. C, 218, note 
 Roland, Chanson de, 129 
 Roman sociology, 75-76 
 
548 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Roman character, 76 
 KusKix, 106 
 Russia, albinoism in, 36 
 religion in, 96 
 
 St. Leger, Lord, 146 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 7, 10, 270 
 
 Sanskrit, 31 
 
 Saracen civilisation, no 
 
 Savoyards, 68 
 
 Scandinavia, blonds and darks in, 34, 
 
 37 
 
 • races of, 64 
 
 culture in, 75, 95, 130-131, 144 
 
 Schubert, 201 
 Scotland and France, 15 
 
 and Ireland, 243-246 
 
 and England, 248, 25S, 274, 
 
 313 
 
 Normans in, 243 
 
 Protestantism in, 93, 95, 144 
 
 monarchism in, 211 
 
 Scott, 21S-219 
 
 Scythians, 57 
 
 Self-government, 92, 100-106 
 Semitic races, 29, 112-114 
 Sheridan, Thos., 163, note 
 Shipping, Irish, 261 
 
 SiSMONDI, 178 
 
 Sitones, 84 
 
 Skene, 55-56 
 
 Skull measurement, 39, 66 
 
 ■ deformations, 40, 67, note 
 
 shapes, 92-97, 108-109 
 
 Slavs, 68 
 
 Smith, Goi.nwiN, 9, 47, 11 1, note, 
 
 265-293 
 
 • Adam, 280 
 
 Socialism in Germany, 97 
 
 influences of, 123 
 
 Spain, 193, 194, 319 
 
 Spenser, 149, 159, 164, note, 167, 
 
 note 
 Staniiiurst, Speaker, 150 
 Strabo, 44, note 
 Strafkoru, Lord, 153, 160, 161 
 Strauss, 25 
 Suevi, 61 
 
 Sullivan, Prof, 50, 52, 60, note 
 Sussex, Earl of, 147 
 Swedes, 34, 37, 39, 41 
 Swinburne, A., lo-ii 
 Swiss, 68 
 
 Protestants, 93, 95, 97 
 
 Tacitus, 49, 55, 60, 61, ()Z, 69, 
 
 79,83 
 Taine, 20-22, 103 
 Tanistry, 307-309 
 Tartans, 127, imte 
 Taylor, Dr L, 66-67, note, 69, 74- 
 
 75, 92-97, 107-108, 112, note 
 Tennyson, 8 
 Teutomania, 207-220 
 " Teuton," meaning of, 63-64 
 "Teutonic" character, 38, note, 74, 
 
 194-204, 207-208, 222-233 
 
 name, 43-47, 55 
 
 prejudice, 14, 23, 27, 49, 190-293 
 
 history, 41, 72-112 
 
 physique, 50, 55 
 
 literature, 91, 129 
 
 Theodoric, 84-85 
 Thierry, Amedee, 17-19 
 Thom, cited, 90, note 
 TOCQUEVILLE, de, 1 77 
 
 Tone, Wolke, 263 
 Topinard, cited, 109, note 
 Toulouse, 96 
 TouRGUKNiEF, 173, note 
 Transvaal raid, 120 
 Treachery, Teutonic, 80, 81 
 Treitschke, 99, note 
 Trouveres, 127 
 Trade, Irish, 161-167, 248 
 Truthfulness in nations, 8, 173 
 Tumuli, 67 
 Turanians, 67, note 
 Turcomans, 35 
 Turks, no, 134, 193, 263 
 Tyndall, 8 
 Tyrconnel, 278 
 
 U 
 
 UjF"ALvy, M. de, 40-41 
 Ulster, harrying of, 151 
 
 agrarian question in, 174 
 
 bigotry in, 175, 293 
 
 and Home Rule, 293, 324-329 
 
 Umbrians, 59, 68 
 Union, faculty for, 75, 78 
 Unionism, ix, 1-13, 185, 281, 320 
 
 V 
 
 Vamfkry, 35 
 
 Varus, defeat of, 80, note 
 
INDEX, 
 
 ;49 
 
 Velleius Patercui.us, cited, So, 
 
 note 
 Vercingetorix, 76, 193 
 ViGFUSsoN and PuwtLL, cited, 130 
 ViRcnow, cited, 32, note, 35, note, 56, 
 
 note 
 \'olcae-Tectosages, 61, 64-65 
 Voltaire, 15 
 
 W 
 
 Waitz, 22, note, 24, note 
 Wallachians, 65 
 Walter de Map, 90, 231 
 War and civilization, 307 
 Weismannisni, xix, 109, 173, note 
 Welsh, meaning of name, 46, 64 
 
 skulls, 68 
 
 literature, 90, 91, 117, note, 215, 
 
 Welsh religion, 94 
 
 Eisteddfod, 117, note 
 
 types, 126, note 
 
 WlLKlNS, Mary, iii 
 
 Women in Germania, 81, 83, 84 
 
 Celtica, Si, 83 
 
 Young, Arthur, 259-260 
 
 Z 
 
 Zangwill, I., 112 114 
 Zealotry, reactions from, 175 
 Zeller, 19, 23-25, 28, note, 84 
 Zimmermann, 37, note 
 Zones, theory of, 16 
 
 TUKNU; I.L AND SltAKS, IKI.Nl liKS, EDINUURGll 
 
J 
 
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