[To TEE Eorroo or TM. "Srsersvea••]
Sia,—Travelling about the kingdom as I have had to do on my business for the last thirty years, I make a point of always reading my Spectator, and I am interested in Mr. Haines's letter under this heading. It may be a pity, as he says, but it is too late to object. We are in a transition stage from a small kingdom to a great Empire. You will not get New Zealanders, Australians, and Canadians to call themselves Englishmen, and it is not any use expecting it; but all are Britons and proud to belong to the British Empire, and ready and willing to fight for it, as we see. There is not any English Parliament, but there is a British Parliament, with an Englishman as Premier, a Welshman as Chancellor, and a Scotsman ae Lord Chancellor. It is well that it should he so, and that all the nationalities should play their parts as partners in the firm.
My favourite reading has been history and race movement, and Mr. Haines's ideas of both are what I learned as a lad fifty years ago, but they are incorrect. The overrunning of the whole land by Anglo-Saxons is not accurate. The great legendary " English " hero is Arthur, and he was a Briton. By the local legends current of hire one can trace the move- ments of the Britons from Cornwall right along and all over the West Coast of England, Wales, and Scotland op to the Clyde Valley. The Britons were Celts. In the South Anglo- Saxons and Normans intermingled, on the East Saxons, Normans, and Danes, and in the North Celts and Norsemen. To talk of us ae Saxons is all wrong, thank God. If it were right we should be of the some race as the Germans, but we are not. From Beachy Head to Carlisle and Carlisle to Thurso there is not one British man with a head shaped like the Teutonic head. We are all a mixture of Scandinavian, Celt, and Norman, and a good mixture it is. Local circum- stances made us fight one another and form England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as separate countries. Now that is done, and we are Britons and the Empire is British. One thing, however, will always be called English, and that is the language, whieh,thank God, goes on spreading over the world. The so-called Scottish language is simply an early and arrested form of it.
There cannot be a real good Imperial patriotism without the heels of a strong local patriotism. The Scotch hold their St. Andrew's Day, and we English should form St. George Societies. Let us all blow our own local trumpets as loud as we can, and our lungs will be in better order to have a go at the Imperial trumpet. It is not any use to complain even if one feared the change would be detrimental, and to me it seems quite the other way about. The British Empire must go on from greatness to greatness, and the English language spread with it. But England only reaches from Land's End to Berwick, and Scotland from the Solway to the Pentland [We have received a good many fierce letters on both sides, but we are sure that our readers generally will agree that this is not a moment for any form of family recrimination, even if only half serious. We have therefore as much as possible confined the correspondence to its geographical, historical, and statutory side, and let the vituperation feed the basket. We feel as strongly as any of our readers the intrinsic superiority of the word " English " over " British," and hold that "English" may well be regarded as short for " English- speaking," which we all are now, whether Celt or Euskarian, Iberian or Teuton. A bargain, however, is a bargain, and there can be no doubt that at the Union with Scotland and the Union with Ireland we agreed on an official title for the United Kingdom which was not "England." That being so, we must muddle on as beat we can, and as in fact we do.— ED. Spectator.]
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