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. 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. In 7. Impermanence and permanence. Here, at the close, Professor 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 1812, 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 lamentable 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 which 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 unadaptableness of the Celt is the exact negation of what was previously said as to his changeableness and receptivity. I do not think there is much left of Professor Richey's racial disquisition, whether as regards his facts or as regards his reasonings. 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 assumptions are freshly set forth. Let him take, for example, the selfstultifying 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 inherited from their ancestors unimpaired-their boundless self-confidence and love of adventure." 1 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 gratuitous. 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 repugnant to the Celtic mind."2 . . . I have already shown that 2 Id., p. 132. 1 Short History, pp. 129-130. this line of assertion is utterly inconsistent with the facts.1 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 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 subrational 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 inconsistent with his remarks on the natural formation of race character, in the later lecture which is reprinted as the first chapter of the posthumous work.2 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 intelligence; 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 prepossessions, we recast the formula in terms of accurate philosophy. The rational course with Newton, then, is the rational course with lesser men. 1 Above, pp. 93-97. 2 See above, pp. 134-135, note, 161-162, note. IV. HILL BURTON ON THE SCOTTISH CELTS. SI. 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 compromise 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 judgments, 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. Το Englishmen, again, his treatment of the ancient quarrel recommends itself by the same qualities; and Dr Freeman, who doubtless 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. 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 exceptionally 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 it1 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,2 66 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 generalisation 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 3 I. 40. 4 I. 44. 1 I. 172. 2 I. 43. "4 |