This (if we may believe Haeckel) was the "inspiration" of the Jewish Law-giver.
THE MARSHALL HOME AT "BUCK POND."
(Near Versailles, Kentucky.)
Built in 1783 by Colonel Thomas Marshall, father of Chief Justice Marshall.
How little escaped the thoughtful eyes of our Semitic statesman, as he surveyed from his coign of vantage the shifting currents of our modern world! In depicting Monsignore Berwick, a descendant of an old Scottish family that for generations had mingled Italian blood with its own, the writer looks quite beyond the native environment, and sees only the old Northern blood in the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the young Italian priest. Describing a nineteenth century function at the beautiful English home of Hugo Bohun, he sees at once in Mr. Gaston Phoebus—the most gifted and attractive of the swells whom fashion has herded in this social jungle of Bohun—not a modern Englishman, but a Gascon noble of the Sixteenth Century, clothed with all the attractions of a contemporary courtier of France—the France of Louis le Grand. In "Gaston Phoebus"—says the philosophic statesman—"Nature, as is sometimes her wont, had chosen to reproduce exactly the original type." When the subtle Semitic thinker introduced an American "Colonel" at the swell function of Hugo Bohun, why should he take him from the South, and give him a Norman name? Had nature reproduced in Colonel Campian the antique Norman type?
It is a notorious fact, says Herbert Spencer, that the Celtic type disappears altogether in the United States.
Doubtless some vague conception of a potential undercurrent of ancestral blood must have been passing through the mind of that fine old gentleman, Mr. Isaac Shelby of Fayette, when dispensing his stores of bachelor wisdom to his young friends just "after the war." He would say, "Depend on it, young gentlemen, there is no cross like a Virginian cross." The differentiating quality was there. It was observed, but not accurately depicted perhaps, by Disraeli, by Barrett Wendell, and by Isaac le Bon. What was it? If a racial quality, what race? Two of these acute observers were of Scandinavian stock. The other did not need to say, even to the proudest statesman at Potsdam or St. James, "Your race is of but yesterday compared with my own." One of Disraeli's favorite themes was race. Indeed, a statesman could not be ignorant of the subject in his day. The claims of race were sweeping over diplomatic arrangements and dynastic rights. Bismarck was unifying the German people by removing ancient landmarks, by "appropriating" autonomous territories, and by appropriating or absorbing a large population of the Scandinavian race; and the third (and last) Napoleon undertook to unify the Latin races by placing an Austrian prince upon the Mexican throne. But the Napoleonic prince pushed his reconstructive theories of race to a destructive conclusion when, in freeing Italy, he furnished a formidable partner to the Triple Alliance, that ultimately destroyed France. The sentiment of race, properly directed, has its uses. But the director must not be a despot or a despot's agent. The feeling must be popular in origin and expression—voluntary, spontaneous, normal, autonomous. There was never a better illustration of its power than in the prolonged struggle of Kentucky for existence as an American State. There was never a better illustration of popular capacity in statecraft and of enterprise in war than in the early years of the last century (1800-12). They—the people—discharged the functions of an independent State. Kentucky was in fact a little nation. Raising and equipping armies, receiving diplomatic emissaries or agents, defending her frontiers, guarding the Atlantic border, protecting the territories of the Northwest, and in conjunction with the "sea-power" of Commodore Perry actually conducting war upon foreign soil. The very guns on Perry's ships were "sighted" by riflemen from Kentucky; and when the day came to try conclusions with the bold Englishman on his own soil, one of the most efficient aides upon Shelby's staff was Perry himself. Is there nothing in this record to appeal to a sentiment of national pride in the Kentuckian's heart? And does it not inspire a disposition to revive and invigorate those pristine instincts of our common race? Probably the recent manifestation of "home-coming" sentiment was denotive of some such stirring of racial impulse and emotion long dormant in the soul.
[XIV]
When following the long dim path of Gothic migration we found but little that seemed to be in vivid relation with the ethnology of our own race; and it was not until we were afloat upon the Scandinavian seas, with Rolf Ganger looking out upon the kingdoms of the earth, that we began to feel ourselves (to speak in paradox) firmly planted upon historic ground. Here the conditions of the old parable are reversed. The genius of civilization is offering the kingdoms of the earth to the Devil himself. With the old pirate of the Norwegian coast begins the great movement that frees, elevates, and modernizes man.[8] Henceforth all is plain sailing for the historical inquirer. The reader may take down his map and trace the foot-prints of the Norse freebooters wherever they dropped a Scandinavian name upon our ancestral soil. These ancient "place names" are found everywhere north of the Avon, and may easily be traced along the eastern coast of England, from the Tyne to the Thames; or, proceeding westward and northward, far beyond the line of the Cheviot Hills;—far beyond the waters of the Tweed. The Scandinavian has resolved to stay wherever he has been planted by the fortunes of war. When his Norman kinsman seized the counties of Southern England, the practical result of the invasion was to reinforce the Anglo-Saxon whom he came to rob. The Norman invader was warmly received by those English Normans—the Danes—in his "wintry marches" to the north. From the dragon teeth thus sown sprang the Kentuckian of to-day, two thirds "dragon" and one third "bull." The "half horse, half alligator" was an Anglo-Norman assimilation of a later date.