ARE THE AMERICANS ANGLO-SAXONS?
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:] SIR,—In the Spectator of April 30th you define an Anglo- Saxon as "one who has been brought up to speak English from a child, and whose father and mother thought in English." You must allow me to protest against this extremely sweeping definition. It is an insult to which we Irish will not submit. It is well known that race and language do not invariably coincide, and that in a collision between two tongues that of the stupider race always prevails; a fact which the English seem to forget when they boast of the manner in which their tongue has overrun the globe. If we add to this fact the English laws of the sixteenth century, which made it penal to speak or teach the Irish language, we cannot wonder that there are hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of us who, though Irish to the core of our hearts and bearing ancient Irish names, have never heard our own tongue from the lips of our own kin. The fact that we are thus compelled to utter our thoughts in an unsuitable medium but deepens our hatred of those whose stupid brutality has compelled us to substitute for our own rich and flexible language that formless olla podrida of words, " conveyed " from every country on the surface of the globe, which goes by the name of English. Were I now writing in my own tongue I would probably be able to express my feelings towards England without descending to her level. As it is impossible to do this in English, I will leave these feelings unexpressed.—I am, [Our oc.rrespondent is, apparently, angry with us because we stated that we should use Anglo-Saxons to mean English- speakers, "subjects of King Shakespeare," and persons living in a polity governed mainly by English ideas. The Irish, both in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and the United Kingdom, appear to us to come under this definition.—En. Spectator.]
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