A more slovenly
use of language can hardly be imagined. Such a compound term as
"Anglo-American" might perhaps be logically defensible, but that has
already become restricted to the English-descended inhabitants of the
United States and Canada alone, in distinction from Spanish Americans
and red Indians. It is never so used as to include Englishmen.
Refraining from all such barbarisms, I prefer to call the English race
by the name which it has always applied to itself, from the time when it
inhabited the little district of Angeln on the Baltic coast of Sleswick
down to the time when it had begun to spread itself over three great
continents. It is a race which has shown a rare capacity for absorbing
slightly foreign elements and moulding them into conformity with a
political type that was first wrought out through centuries of effort on
British soil; and this capacity it has shown perhaps in a heightened
degree in the peculiar circumstances in which it has been placed in
America. The American has absorbed considerable quantities of closely
kindred European blood, but he is rapidly assimilating it all, and in
his political habits and aptitudes he remains as thoroughly English as
his forefathers in the days of De Montfort, or Hampden, or Washington.
Premising this, we may go on to consider some aspects of the work which
the English race has done and is doing in the world, and we need not
feel discouraged if, in order to do justice to the subject, we have to
take our start far back in ancient history.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102