[18-1] Cf. Ency. Brit., vol. ix. p. 588.
[18-2] Price Collier, England and the English, London, 1911, p. 341.
[19-1] As to quoted passages, the reader is cautioned to distinguish in each instance the meanings of the terms England, Britain, Great Britain, British, Britannic, etc. The usage in one quotation may differ from that in another and from that in the non-quoted passages. The terminology in the latter has been adopted to accord with the most accurate and consistent present usage. The only innovation in terms here employed is the word Pan-Angles.
[19-2] Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot, iv.: "I marvel what blood thou art—neither Englander nor Scot," quoted in New English Dictionary, Oxford, 1891—"Englander."
[19-3] Ency. Brit., vol. xii. p. 566.
{21}
II
THE PEOPLE
If an intelligent traveller from Mars were to tour the earth to-day he would jot down in his note-book that New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, Canada, the British Isles, and the United States were all inhabited by the same sort of people. Their language, their forms of government, their ways of thinking and of conducting the various departments of life would lead him to think so. And he would be right. The English-speaking traveller, denied the point of view of an outsider, is prone to take the likenesses for granted and to dwell on the differences, using his own local group as a yard-stick to measure the rest. Beneath his criticism, however, he is conscious that in these countries he is at home in the same sense that he is an alien in all others. Whichever of the seven he may be from, he finds in each of the other six, men he can hardly tell from himself, and realizes that in his own political unit, whose oneness he never questions, there are communities with natures more dissimilar than are the natures of these seven nations. No knowledge of history is needed for either him or the Martian to conclude that while they use different names to designate this part or that, {22} they are speaking always of one people and one civilization.
Of what stuffs the English-speaking people were fashioned has already been explained. England, when colonization began, held the germ of the future Pan-Angles. Within two centuries Scotland and Ireland were united with England and Wales under one government, and the English language and English ideals penetrated further and further into those once Celtic strongholds. Welsh, Scots, and Irish brought their contributions to our development. They wrote English poems and English books. They officered the army and built battleships. They made and administered laws, and furnished prime ministers for the British Isles. Like the Englanders they too migrated to the new Pan-Angle lands, seeking religious or political liberty in some cases, but oftenest seeking the means of a more satisfactory life. These they have found. By this blending of all British Isles stocks came new vitality to the Pan-Angles.