What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul,
the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his
origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans
have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the
Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from
the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning
another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may
have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English
prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but
I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey
that the Welsh are “the prize liars of the universe.” He was an expert
accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the
three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves
know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it
is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to
lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably
afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant
inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions,
for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests,
there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together
the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I
ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that
always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those
who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered
the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to
strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary
part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there
could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom
it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame
the others.
I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was
he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment
in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at
least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. “These Welsh farmers,”
he said, “send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite
the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending
his boy to a University!”
We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase
are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by
which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving
through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify
because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an
illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide.
It was the accumulation, not merely within men’s memories, but within
the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great
nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of
enclosing the people’s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of
the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through
the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to
their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of
our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin.
Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know
what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of
a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful
corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people’s
land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a
handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid
condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk
freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a
magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to
hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in
whispered confidence as a “Upas tree.”