Anglomania

“ They even seemed able to gratify little harmless flights of fancy, such as coming out unexpectedly in singular suits of Brobdignagian checks or startling green cut-aways, which, with a pair of luxuriant whiskers, a hasty, determined walk, and a peculiar flourish of the stick, were supposed to constitute the faithful portraiture of an Englishman, than to resemble whom there could be no greater privilege, so great was the Anglomania that prevailed. ”

“ Anglomania in one form or other is to be met with in all countries, especially France and Germany, and has shown itself here and there all over the Continent ever since the peace of 1815. The things in which it most imitates the English are riding, driving, men's clothes, sports in general, and domestic comfort. ”

“ On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England, where the so–called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country. [3] This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language. ”

“ A few years ago, for instance, with the increasing facilities for foreign travel, and the corresponding increase of international intercourse, Anglomania had become so much in vogue as to form an incipient danger to the true democratic American spirit that constitutes the real strength of our nation. It was fast becoming a national habit to extol everything European—from monarchy and its aristocratic institutions down to the humblest article of dress or of household use—to the detriment of everything American ”

“ The repeated visits of the Duc d’Orleans to England had excited the Anglomania to such a pitch that Paris was no longer distinguishable from London. The French, formerly imitated by the whole of Europe, became on a sudden a nation of imitators, without considering the evils that arts and manufactures must suffer in consequence of the change. Since the treaty of commerce made with England at the peace of 1783, not merely equipages, but everything, even to ribands and common earthenware, were of English make. ”

“ And note that Ireland still is and always will be a Nation. There is no Anglomania in that fair land, no yearning for reciprocity for the sake of a few dollars, no drinking of the Queen's health first. ”

“ An Englishman, representing as he does the insular Angles, and looking to the part that they have played in the world, may, with either pride or regret, as the case may be, say that on their native soil of Germany, the Angle history is next to a non-entity. It is like that of the Majiars of Asia. What our ancestors did at home before they became the Englishmen of Great Britain may have been of any amount of importance, or, [202] of any amount of insignificance. ”

“ One groans at your intolerable tristesse. La vie en Angleterre est comme un marais. It is a scandal to human nature. It blows fogs, foul vapours, joint- stiffnesses, agues, pestilences, over us here,—yes, here! That is your best side: but your worst is too atrocious! Mon Dieu! Your men-rascals! Your women-rascals!'
'Good soul!' the princess arrested her, 'I beg that you will not abuse
England.'
'Have I abused England?' exclaimed the margravine. ”

“ Under a limited monarchy and a widely embracing franchise, the people of England enjoy an unrivalled political freedom. Since Henry VIII.'s time, the national religion has been an established Protestantism, but all forms are tolerated. In 1896 education was made free. The name England is derived from Engle-land, or land of the Angles, a Teutonic people who, with kindred Saxons and Jutes, came over from the mainland in the 5th century, and took possession of the island, driving Britons and Celts before them. ”

“ England has always tended to fall into two cross divisions—a northern and a southern one, separated at first by climate (the northern more rude, the southern more gentle) , then by agricultural conditions, the northern far less peopled, the southern more peopled and more wealthy; and to an eastern and western division separated by type of landscape, to some extent by climate, always to some extent by soil, difference in race, emphasized whenever an invasion came [128] from the Welsh lands on the one side or from the North Sea on the other. ”

“ But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? ”

“ But England is the living mother of great nations on the American and on the Australian continents, which promise to endow the world with all her knowledge and all her civilization, and with even something more than the freedom she herself enjoys.
Eighty-five years ago, at the time when some of our oldest townsmen were very little children, there were, on the North American continent, Colonies, mainly of Englishmen, containing about three millions of souls. ”

“ The dominion of the English kings on the continent is of the highest European moment, but, from its geographical side, it is Gaul and not Britain which it affects. ♦English settlements beyond sea.♦ The really great geographical phænomenon of English history is that which it shares with Spain and Portugal, and in which it surpasses both. This is the vast extent of outlying English dominion and settlement, partly in Europe, but far more largely in the distant lands of Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. But it is not merely that England has become a great power in all quarters of the world ”

“ The English-speaking peoples owe a great deal to the Celts; and there is Celtic blood in a good many who are of mostly Nordic stock. But the British Empire and the American Republic were founded and are led more by Anglo-Normans than even Anglo-Normans know. For the Anglo-Normans include not only the English and their descendants overseas but many who are called Scotch and Irish, because, though of Anglo-Norman blood, they or their forefathers were born in Scotland or Ireland. ”

“ And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept. ”

“ England is less a nation than a race. The Anglo-Saxons know no fatherland but the sea. England, looked upon as wealthy in her vast domains, owes her fortune and her power to her commerce. It is not her colonies which should be envied her, but her merchants, the authors of her wealth. ”

“ It has never yet been proved to my satisfaction, and I think I may promise you it never will, that England would be worse off without India, or Ireland, or Australia, or Malta, or Gibraltar. Are not the Dutch, and Belgians, and Portuguese as happy and prosperous as the Irish? Is not our true position amongst the fifth-rate Powers of the world, and should we not be more honest and respected if we accepted it? ”

“ He was the first king who ruled all England as one kingdom. Long before his birth the people who are known to us as Britons lived there, and they gave to the island the name Britain.
But Britain was invaded by the Romans under Julius Cæsar and his successors, and all that part of it which we now call England was added to the Empire of Rome. The Britons were driven into Wales and Cornwall, the western sections of the island. ”

“ There is no trace of any Englishmen in Denmark or Germany after the exodus to Britain. Their language, of which a dialect still survives in Friesland, has utterly died out in Sleswick. The English took for their share of Britain the nearest east coast. We have little record of their arrival, even in the legendary story; we merely learn that in 547, Ida "succeeded to the kingdom" of the Northumbrians, whence we may possibly conclude that the colony was already established. The English settlement extended from the Forth to Essex, and was subdivided into Bernicia, Deira, and East Anglia. ”

“ But it was God’s will that not Spain but England should win—and so to-day we find the English-speaking peoples of the world in Great Britain and America, in Australia and Africa, free, enlightened, full of great purpose and noble aims, working out in very truth their own salvation. ”

“ Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus in the Mediterranean, Aden, Singapore, and Hong Kong in the Far Eastern seas were acquired and fortified in order to protect British commerce. It could be said with truth that the sun never set upon the flag of England, and that the morning drum-beat of her garrisons saluted the sun in his daily journey around the world. At the close of the century the foreign possessions of Great Britain amounted in area to ten million square miles, and in population to three hundred and fifty million souls. ”

“ THE ANGLO-SAXONS IN BRITAIN.—We have already seen how in the time of Rome's distress the Angles and Saxons secured a foothold in Britain (see p. 344) . The advance of the invaders here was stubbornly resisted by the half-Romanized Celts of the island. At the end of a century and a half of fighting, the German tribes had gained possession of only the eastern half of what is now England. On the conquered soil they set up eight or nine, or perhaps more, petty kingdoms. For the space of two hundred years there was an almost perpetual strife among these states for supremacy. ”

“ This granted, every hour will strengthen the relations already established between us; but should the object of our League, so near to our hearts, fail us, should the British public prove deaf or indifferent, or the minister prove inexorable, your mission will have been discharged; and we must await, as best we may, the development of those providential purposes which are often most obscure when they are nearest the dawn. 'England has no right to cast out amongst other nations, or upon naked shores, either her poverty or her crime. ”

“ But how much more noble is the boast of the Englishman, that England is not circumscribed by the walls of her capital, nor even by the four seas that gird her cliffs, but that wherever, under her red-cross flag, her laws are observed, her institutions retained, and her memory cherished, there England does in fact exist. ”

“ Our area, they say, is too large, although all compact and connected by the greatest arterial river-system of the globe. But England is not large enough, and new possessions are constantly added by the sword, although her territory is double our own, and scattered over all the continents, and many of the isles of the world. If, before or shortly after this struggle began, England had spoken a word of friendship and sympathy for us—if she had but repeated her former denunciations of slavery, and given us the moral weight of her opinion—the rebellion would have been crushed long since. ”

“ It’s a favorite trick of our anti-British friends to call England a “land-grabber.” The way in which England has grabbed land right along, all over the world, is monstrous, they say. England has stolen what belonged to whites, and blacks, and bronzes, and yellows, wherever she could lay her hands upon it, they say. England is a criminal. ”

“ They had not only a respect, but an affection, for Great Britain—for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Britain were always treated with particular regard; to be an Old-Englandman was, of itself, a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank among us. ”

“ Of our last day’s wanderings I have already told in my chapter on East Anglia.
Travel-stained but unwearied, the tried and trusty companion of our pilgrimage stands before our London hotel. It is hard to think of her—is the pronoun right?—as a thing of iron and steel; [Pg 378] she has won a personality to us; but, metaphor aside, what a splendid means to a splendid end the motor has become! In two summers we have seen more of Britain than one might find it practicable to see in years under old conditions, and we have seen the most delightful, though unfamiliar, side. ”

“ In addition to the home-land, England ruled, as colonies, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, sea fortresses, such as Gibraltar and Malta, Asiatic possessions, including in India an empire twenty times as populous as the ruling country, Canada, Jamaica, the Barbadoes, the Thirteen Colonies, etc. Our own thirteen colonies, which were not united among themselves and which were not different in the eyes of an Englishman from any other of the colonies, formed a small part geographically of the empire and had for their peculiar distinction only the larger proportion of English residents. ”

“ Nor is it all a one-sided affair—England expecting so much of him and he having no say or control over what England does. On the contrary, the relationship is mutual. He goes to the making and shaping of England just as much as she goes to the making and shaping of him. He expects certain behaviour of her as she expects such of him. And if he has gained the confidence of his fellow-countrymen and has energy and determination, he may do much to affect her destiny. ”