The statement which I have just made, that Britons are really a uniform
folk, seems altogether at variance with the teaching of history. What I
am to say now will explain a discrepancy which, in its essence, is only
superficial. Our written history opens with the Roman invasion and
occupation of Britain; it was an 'occupation' or 'plantation', not a
true colonization. On the other hand, the Saxon and Danish invasions
ended in widely spread and true colonizations of Britain. The Norman
invasion, on the other hand, was of the nature of a plantation. I will
make the difference between the various forms of invasion apparent
presently. There have been, too, flocks of immigrant refugees at various
times. We have the most positive evidence that long before the dawn of
written history the processes of invasion and colonization had been
going on in Britain. In all these invasions, historic and prehistoric,
with one important exception, no strange or new racial stock was added
to the British Isles; all were apparently branches of the human stock
which still occupy the north-west of Europe--men of the Nordic type--or
as I should prefer to call them, the North Sea breed. We are only now
beginning to realize that even at the dawn of the present period, a
period marked by the retreat of the ice sheet from the Baltic basin, the
seashore and the sea itself were the high roads along which primitive
peoples migrated and spread. They were people of the same human type
who spread themselves along the shores of the Mediterranean and occupied
its coastal lands. The distribution of the Mediterranean breed was
determined by the limits of their sea. Apparently the shores of the
North Sea were settled in a similar way. We have but scanty remains from
the midden heaps along its ancient shores to tell us about the kind of
folk these early settlers were, but so far as the evidence goes it
supports the supposition that the Nordic type was already in possession
of north-west Europe before the dawn of the Neolithic period. We can
only explain the distribution of the Nordic type along the shorelands of
the North Sea, of the Baltic, and of the British seas, on the
supposition of a primitive and ancient North Sea stock--made up of men
of the Nordic type. The earliest cave dwellers of England were of this
type. It was this North Sea stock which gave Britain not only her
original population but also her succession of colonists. It is certain
that there were also invasions of Britain from the Mediterranean stock,
but we have only to compare a sample of our modern population with one
drawn from a Mediterranean people to see how little our blood has been
affected by a southern mixture. In all these invasions and colonizations
there is only one which was not drawn from the North Sea stock. That
invasion took place in the second millenium before Christ, when the
round-headed stock of Central Europe broke through the Nordic belt,
reached the shores of the North Sea, and invaded Britain on a scale
which has never been equalled before or since save in Saxon times. That
invasion of round-heads broke first on England and Scotland, but Wales
and particularly Ireland received in time a full share of the fresh
arrivals. With this one exception all the invaders and settlers of the
British Isles were waves derived from the same prolific source--the
North Sea breed. We see, then, why there should be little physical
difference between Celt and Saxon. The one was an earlier wave, the
other a much later wave of the same stock. But each wave brought its own
mode of speech and its own tribal spirit. Of all the inhabitants of the
British Isles the Irish may be regarded as the purest representatives of
the North Sea or Nordic stock.