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 Condescension 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.2 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

1 Compare Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect, Glasgow ed., 1883, pp. 258-261, and an article England and America in 1863, in Harper's Magazine, May 1896, p. 847.

2 Readers of Mr Howells' novel, A Fearful Responsibility, and of Mr Crawford's romance, Mr Isaacs, wlll remember the passages in point.

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 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

mass

1

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 strifelessness, 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.2 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

1 The present opportunity may be 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.

2 Psalm lxxxiv. 1-12. "A review of the history of your own denomination " is the suggested exercise.

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 plane 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.

§ 1. The Causation 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 1 for believing that among the groups in question there were tribes of "Teutonic" kinship as well 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 2 whether as regards skull, hair, skin,

1 Penka (Herkunft der Arier, S. 174) sees evidence in Irish tradition for the view that the Gaël came from Scandinavia.

2 "The 'macrognathism' [largeness of jaw] . . . popularly supposed to be characteristic of the Irish face, and always appearing in the Irishmen of

"1

eyes, or stature, save in so far as we find there, as in England and Scotland, a majority of dark or brown-haired people. The common notion that Irishmen are mostly dark-eyed is an error. "It is a curious and suggestive fact," says Dr Beddoe, “—suggestive 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 1130 the following proportions :-blue eyes, 34°1 per cent.; grey eyes, 546; 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." 2 Further, the average stature of Irishmen is greater than that of Englishmen.3 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).

1 Art. The Kelts of Ireland, in Journal of Anthropology, Oct. 1870, p. 119. Cp. Dr Beddoe's article in the Memoirs 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 predominantly 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 preponderate in Denbighshire. (Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 68.) Personally, I have not noticed there any such preponderance.

3 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).