T. W. H. Crosland

“ England, it is impossible for her to get rid of a certain feeling of isolation which is not good for the spirits. The soft rain that is always over her may heighten the green of her meadows, but it keeps her damp and watery and preternaturally boggy. She has no harbors of the kind that are essential to fishermen, and though some of her ports may be admirable, there is little in the country that calls for the use of them. Thus physically handicapped, Ireland has necessarily produced a people who are in all respects a people to themselves. ”

“ What was a simple and very human foible on the part of the Irishman, has become, with the American, a raging and soul-consuming obsession. Pork, pork, pork, pork, pork! That is the cry that rises daily and hourly to heaven from the greater part of the United-States-half of North America. Everybody is concerned in it; everybody has money in it; everybody wants to get more money out of it. ”

“ In an Irish hotel dirt and its common concomitant, tumbledownness, are ever before you. The floors clamor to be swept, the furniture would give a day of its life for a polishing, the wall papers are faded and fly-blown, there are cobwebs in the top corners and dust in the bottom corners, the windows are rickety and perfunctorily cleaned, the carpets infirm and old, the linen worn and yellow with age, the crockery cracked and chipped, the cutlery dull and greasy, and the general air of the place shabby and forlorn. I do not say that there are no cleanly and spick-and-span hotels in Dublin ”

“ What is more beautiful or meet to be taken to the bosom than the Englishman? Everybody loves him; his goings to and fro upon the earth are as the progresses of one who has done all men good. He drops fatness and blessings as he walks. He smiles benignity and graciousness and "I-am-glad-to-see-you-all-looking-so-well." And before him runs one in plush, crying, "Who is the most popular man of this footstool?" And all the people shall rejoice and say, "The Englishman—God bless him!" ”

“ All that is best in Burns (and that is nearly the whole) will remain a precious possession with the Anglo-Saxon race in the ages yet to come. The Stars and Stripes of our cousins across the sea—the great American people—will ere long float side by side with the grand old flag that for a thousand years has braved the battle and the breeze. And the Bible and Burns will lie side by side in the homes of the reunited Anglo-Saxon race,—the freest, bravest, and most liberty-loving people the world ever saw or shall see. ”

“ For one thing, he hasn’t got the climate; and for another he hasn’t got either the pea-nuts or the pork.
Let the Englishman, therefore, be content to remain unreservedly and unsophisticatedly English. When he sees an American adaptation or invasion—whether commercial, social, religious, or otherwise—coming his way, let him frown it down, pass by it and flee from it. Such things may seem simple and innocuous and desirable enough in themselves, they may tickle the imagination, and they may even appear to be for the distinct betterment of mankind. ”

“ I am inclined to think that nearly all the blarney that should be in Ireland has for some reason or other taken unto itself wings and flown away. The people are no longer racy of the soil. Even the gentry, who once had the credit of being roguish and devil-may-care to a fault, are become sad and somber and flat of speech. The milk of human kindness in the Irish blood appears, in short, to have gone sour, and in place of the old disposition to humor we have a tendency to cynicism and vituperative remark. ”

“ Of our great nation.
It is like this:
The Bulldog is not too beautiful,
Neither is our great nation;
But he frightens people—
So do we;
He is tenacious
And magnanimous—
Which is just our game;
He fears no foe in shining armour,
Or any other sort of armour—
That is precisely our case;
And he is kept by Lord Charles Beresford,
The Duke of Manchester,
And Mr. G. R. Sims—
Three eminently typical Britons.
In short,
The genius of the British nation,
My dear Brindle,
Is not a policeman
But a Bulldog. ”

“ I have no desire to belittle a hard-worked, and probably underpaid, body of public servants. Their profession is a thankless one. I do not think for a moment a single man of them went into it with his eyes open, and I know for a certainty that the school boards and the Government between them have so hedged it round with petty annoyances that a man possessed of feeling must loathe it. It is probably this feeling of loathing of his work that keeps the English schoolmaster down. ”

“ When an American meets an Englishman who is [115] trying to run his business or his household or other of his affairs after American models, and particularly when he meets an Englishman who looks upon the Americans as his superiors and masters at the game of life, he is sheerly, if unavowedly, amazed. He knows what America is, he knows in his heart what America means, and if it lay in his power to choose the place to which he will go when he dies, that place would not be Chicago, nor would it be even Paris, but a clean, free, un-Americanised England. ”

“ The Old School—of which, by the way, every Scotchman save one is either a member or a supporter—has had a tremendous vogue and has accomplished superhuman things for the country and people of its love. To this school the Scotch superstition owes its origin and its firm grip on the imagination of the average white man. It is a forthright, downright, thorough sort of school, not in the least diffident or mealy-mouthed, not in the least ambiguous, not in the least infected with that “proud reserve” which is understood to be Scotland’s noblest heritage. ”

“ The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"—oh, this English lunch!—at the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh rare-bit. ”

“ In finding such a jobbing gardener, my dear Sir William;
And, to come at once to the plain poetry so belovèd of this age,
Let me tell you, my dear Sir William,
That, in my opinion, you (and no other) are at the present juncture
The real trouble and incubus of the party you love.
If you would only go home and crown yourself with a laurel or two,
And read history books, and take tea with bishops
And not come back again,
I believe the Liberal party
Would begin to get along like a house afire.
Will you not try it, my dear Sir William; oh, will you not try it? ”