William Robinson Clark

“ We are proud of them as our own children. All their great institutions have been borrowed from our own. All their history is a continuance of our history, and we regard those who belong to that country as our friends. I, for one, certainly have no fault to find with them. I have received honours in the United States, more than I have been entitled to, so that it would be most ungrateful for me to say anything unkind about them. But that is all very well. You may be on very good terms with your neighbours without having them live in your house or you living in theirs ”

“ It is, Sir, a great race from which we came, or rather two great races, for I must protest that the way men speak of us as Anglo-Saxons is very imperfect and inadequate. We are not Anglo-Saxon simply, but Anglo-Celtic in origin. ”

“ There is no history in the world upon which the eye of man can rest with the same satisfaction as upon the history of the three Kingdoms in the past.
I dare say a critical eye may detect errors in us. A French writer has put it excellently when he said that we have all the defects of our qualities. I dare say we have defects. I dare say the Englishman may occasionally become a little bumptious, the Scotchman conceited and the Irishman a trifle vain ”