In all these processes of national fusion, as in the formation of all trusts in the modern commercial world, the anthropologist observes that the operation commences from above and works downwards through the mass of the people. The governing class plays upon and fans into flame the tribal embers of the popular mind. It is altogether a different process which brings about the disruption of a nationality. Disruption has nothing to do with race; the nearer the blood relationship between two adjacent peoples the more likely is disruption to occur. We can find no better illustration of this truth than when we cross the Baltic from Germany to Scandinavia. The people of Norway and Sweden are of the same racial composition; they have many interests in common; union should have given strength. Yet after a partnership which lasted for less than a century, they agreed to separate. In this case the movement came from below; a tribal feeling which swept through the people of Norway compelled a disruption. All the natural inherited forces in a people tend towards disruption. Only when reason takes the helm can these natural disruptive forces be overcome and the process of fusion be effected.
British National Problems
Having thus made a hurried survey of some of the more instructive, racial, and national problems abroad we now return homewards to apply the knowledge thus gained to the understanding of the national manifestations of our own countrymen. There is no need to remind you that the national spirit of Robert Boyle's native country is always boiling up, often boiling over. Scotland, too, has a national spirit, so has Wales; in both countries this spirit is separatist in its essence, but the national instinctive tendencies are curbed and guided by the higher reasoning centres of the brain. In England itself the sense of nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without stirs this gigantic force into life. In Ireland the national kettle is kept always on the boil; in Scotland and Wales it is kept simmering; in England, on the other hand, it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless English nationality is a force which pervades the whole population lying between Berwick-on-Tweed and Land's End. In the course of centuries statesmanship has succeeded in raising up in the minds of all the inhabitants of the British Isles—all save in the greater part of Ireland—a new and wider sense of nationality, a spirit of British nationality. Why we never succeeded in raising that spirit in the whole of Ireland represents the major part of our present quest.
Are Celts and Saxons of different Racial Stocks?
At the outset of our inquiry we are met by the ancient belief that the British Isles are divided by a racial frontier which separates the western or Celtic peoples from the eastern inhabitants of Saxon origin. It was my fortune to be born on the border of the Celtic fringe, and no one growing up under these circumstances can fail to realize that the Celtic spirit is a real and live force. Is it a racial antagonism which is elicited when Celt and Saxon are in conflict? What is the physical difference between a Celt and a Saxon? That is a matter to which I have given my attention for some years, and the results of my inquiries I will place before you as briefly as I may. In the audience now before me there are certain to be pure representatives of all our four nationalities; Celts and Saxons as pure as any in the country are sure to be present in any university audience. But except for a trick of speech or a local mannerism, the most expert anthropologist cannot tell Celt from Saxon or an Irishman from a Scotsman. There are, to be sure, certain physical types which prevail in one country more than in another, but I do not know of any feature of the body or any trait of the mind, or of any combination of features or traits which will permit an expert, on surveying groups of university students, to say this group is from Scotland, that from Wales, the third from Ireland, and the fourth from England. In stature and in colouring, in form of skull and of face, elaborate trials have revealed national difference only of the most minor kind. Nay, we know very well the physical features of the Saxon pioneers who became the masters of England and dominated the lowlands of Scotland. Their graveyards have been examined by the score, but it is not by the form of the skulls and the strength of the limb bones that we know we are dealing with the graves of ancient Saxons, but by the implements, ornaments, and utensils which were buried with them. As regards shape of skull or form of bones I do not think a practised craniologist could distinguish the skulls and bones found in an ancient Saxon cemetery in Surrey from the remains of a Celtic grave in Connemara, so much are Celtic and Saxon types alike. Were we to dress one group of fishermen from the coast of Norfolk and another from the shores of Connaught in the same garb, I do not think there is an anthropologist in Europe who by mere inspection could tell the Irish from the English group. From a physical point of view the Celt and Saxon are one; whatever be the source of their mutual antagonism, it does not lie in a difference of race. It is often said that we British are a mixed and mongrel collection of types and breeds; the truth is that as regards physical type the inhabitants of the British Isles are the most uniform of all the large nationalities of Europe.
All British Nationalities are of the North Sea Stock
The statement which I have just made, that Britons are really a uniform folk, seems altogether at variance with the teaching of history. What I am to say now will explain a discrepancy which, in its essence, is only superficial. Our written history opens with the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain; it was an 'occupation' or 'plantation', not a true colonization. On the other hand, the Saxon and Danish invasions ended in widely spread and true colonizations of Britain. The Norman invasion, on the other hand, was of the nature of a plantation. I will make the difference between the various forms of invasion apparent presently. There have been, too, flocks of immigrant refugees at various times. We have the most positive evidence that long before the dawn of written history the processes of invasion and colonization had been going on in Britain. In all these invasions, historic and prehistoric, with one important exception, no strange or new racial stock was added to the British Isles; all were apparently branches of the human stock which still occupy the north-west of Europe—men of the Nordic type—or as I should prefer to call them, the North Sea breed. We are only now beginning to realize that even at the dawn of the present period, a period marked by the retreat of the ice sheet from the Baltic basin, the seashore and the sea itself were the high roads along which primitive peoples migrated and spread. They were people of the same human type who spread themselves along the shores of the Mediterranean and occupied its coastal lands. The distribution of the Mediterranean breed was determined by the limits of their sea. Apparently the shores of the North Sea were settled in a similar way. We have but scanty remains from the midden heaps along its ancient shores to tell us about the kind of folk these early settlers were, but so far as the evidence goes it supports the supposition that the Nordic type was already in possession of north-west Europe before the dawn of the Neolithic period. We can only explain the distribution of the Nordic type along the shorelands of the North Sea, of the Baltic, and of the British seas, on the supposition of a primitive and ancient North Sea stock—made up of men of the Nordic type. The earliest cave dwellers of England were of this type. It was this North Sea stock which gave Britain not only her original population but also her succession of colonists. It is certain that there were also invasions of Britain from the Mediterranean stock, but we have only to compare a sample of our modern population with one drawn from a Mediterranean people to see how little our blood has been affected by a southern mixture. In all these invasions and colonizations there is only one which was not drawn from the North Sea stock. That invasion took place in the second millenium before Christ, when the round-headed stock of Central Europe broke through the Nordic belt, reached the shores of the North Sea, and invaded Britain on a scale which has never been equalled before or since save in Saxon times. That invasion of round-heads broke first on England and Scotland, but Wales and particularly Ireland received in time a full share of the fresh arrivals. With this one exception all the invaders and settlers of the British Isles were waves derived from the same prolific source—the North Sea breed. We see, then, why there should be little physical difference between Celt and Saxon. The one was an earlier wave, the other a much later wave of the same stock. But each wave brought its own mode of speech and its own tribal spirit. Of all the inhabitants of the British Isles the Irish may be regarded as the purest representatives of the North Sea or Nordic stock.
There are Kinds of Colonization—Spontaneous and Forced
The refusal of the Irish to merge their sense of nationality in a common British whole cannot be explained by any difference in blood or race. We shall get nearer to the heart of the problem if we can discover why the people on the north-east of Ireland, particularly in counties Antrim and Down, in contrast with the rest of Ireland, are sharers in the common British spirit. It is true that, even in ancient times, there was a community of feeling between Ulstermen and the West Scotch. Even in Neolithic times their cultures show a free intercourse. Before the plantation of Ireland by lowland folk in the seventeenth century, Ulster was frequented by bands of Highland Scots. Neither of these circumstances explain the unionist spirit of Ulster. Nor is the spirit of north-east Ulster a matter of British admixture. A careful examination of all the available data relating to the plantation of Ireland between 1560 and 1660 will show that an even greater proportion of British blood was poured into Leinster and Munster than into Ulster. At the end of the plantation period probably one Irishman out of every three in the provinces of Leinster and Munster had blood of British colonists in his veins. In this reckoning no count is made of the people who landed and settled in Ireland in the five centuries which preceded 1560—Danes, Normans, Welsh, and English. It is not the number of British colonists which has made north-east Ulster separatist in spirit, so far as the rest of Ireland is concerned—and unionist, so far as Great Britain is concerned. The north-east region of Ireland was the only part which was truly colonized; only a real or spontaneous colonization can carry a tribal or national spirit to a new land.
For the anthropologist a true or spontaneous colonization is a totally different process from one which is false or forced. At the very time at which the English Government was settling or planting colonists on Irish soil and among Irish people, a spontaneous exodus set in among the North Sea peoples. This exodus—a people's movement—established a Saxon fringe along the eastern sea-board of North America. The exodus, which began in the seventeenth century, has continued to the present time—three full centuries. Thus fed, the fringe extended until it reached the Pacific shore. The original fringe represented a true tribal settlement; within the pioneer communities grew up the consciousness of nationality and of race-antagonism, which we have already noted in the Saxon peoples of North America. The break-away—the natural process of disintegration, represented by the War of Independence—is usually explained as a result of bad government. The disputes between the British Government and the colonists were certainly the circumstances which determined the disruption, but the forces which impelled the colonists to action were those subconscious impulses which Nature has planted deep in the human mind as part of her evolutionary machinery.