ENGLAND NOT A " GERMANIC NATION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sta,—It is rather surprising that none of your readers should have animadverted on Mr. J. M. Ludlow's letter in the Spectator of November 3rd. This gentleman is not pleased with the German Emperor for putting us English among the " Germanic " peoples. But the Emperor was quite right, and is not responsible for misapprehensions due to our faulty nomenclature. Mr. Ludlow and (now I see) Dean Stubbs must have forgotten that on the Continent, especially in what we call " Germany" (but the natives Deutschland), the term " German" and its derivations are understood in the wide racial sense in which Tacitus uses Germani and Germania. In employing his adjective, therefore, the Emperor was aware that it properly covered not only the constituent tribes of the Empire (die Deutschen), but Scandinavians, Austrians, Batavians, English, and even North Americans, Australians, and other Colonists. We have unhappily limited the scope of " German" to an equivalence with Deutsch; and it is apparently upon that limited sense that Mr. Ludlow's grievance is based. To match the wider sense of " German " English philologists have adopted " Teuton," " Teutonic," which, by a curious compensation, show the same root as
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