Jean de La Fontaine - "The Tales and Novels, v23: The River Scamander &c."

Padraic Colum - "The King of Ireland's Son"

Sir Richard Francis Burton - "Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah"

P.G. Wodehouse - "The Little Nugget"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




In the Great Charter there is a provision in favour of the Welsh, who
were allied with the Barons in insurrection against the Crown. The
Barons were fighting for the Charter, the Welshmen only for their
barbarous and predatory independence. But the struggle for Welsh
independence helped those who were struggling for the Charter; and the
remark may be extended in substance to the general influence of Wales on
the political contest between the Crown and the Barons. Even under the
House of Lancaster, Llewellyn was faintly reproduced in Owen Glendower.
The powerful monarchy of the Tudors finally completed the annexation.
But isolation survived independence. The Welshman remained a Celt and
preserved his language and his clannish spirit, though local magnates,
such as the family of Wynn, filled the place in his heart once occupied
by the chief. Ecclesiastically he was annexed, but refused to be
incorporated, never seeing the advantage of walking in the middle path
which the State Church of England had traced between the extremes of
Popery and Dissent. He took Methodism in a Calvinistic and almost wildly
enthusiastic form. In this respect his isolation is likely to prove far
more important than anything which Welsh patriotism strives to
resuscitate by Eisteddfodds. In the struggle, apparently imminent,
between the system of Church Establishments and religious equality,
Wales furnishes a most favourable battle-ground to the party of
Disestablishment.

The Teutonic realm of England was powerful enough to subdue, if not to
assimilate, the remnants of the Celtic race in Wales and their other
western hills of refuge. But the Teutonic realm of Scotland was not
large or powerful enough to subdue the Celts of the Highlands, whose
fastnesses constituted in geographical area the greater portion of the
country. It seems that in the case of the Highlands, as in that of
Ireland, Teutonic adventurers found their way into the domain of the
Celts and became chieftains, but in becoming chieftains they became
Celts. Down to the Hanoverian times the chain of the Grampians which
from the Castle of Stirling is seen rising like a wall over the rich
plain, divided from each other two nationalities, differing totally in
ideas, institutions, habits, and costume, as well as in speech, and the
less civilized of which still regarded the more civilized as alien
intruders, while the more civilized regarded the less civilized as
robbers. Internally, the topographical character of the Highlands was
favourable to the continuance of the clan system, because each clan
having its own separate glen, fusion was precluded, and the progress
towards union went no further than the domination of the more powerful
clans over the less powerful. Mountains also preserve the general
equality and brotherhood which are not less essential to the
constitution of the clan than devotion to the chief, by preventing the
use of that great minister of aristocracy, the horse. At Killiecrankie
and Prestonpans the leaders of the clan and the humblest clansman still
charged on foot side by side. Macaulay is undoubtedly right in saying
that the Highland risings against William III. and the first two Georges
were not dynastic but clan movements. They were in fact the last raids
of the Gael upon the country which had been wrested from him by the
Sassenach. Little cared the clansman for the principles of Filmer or
Locke, for the claims of the House of Stuart or for those of the House
of Brunswick. Antipathy to the Clan Campbell was the nearest approach to
a political motive. Chiefs alone, such as the unspeakable Lovat, had
entered as political _condottieri_ into the dynastic intrigues of
the period, and brought the claymores of their clansmen to the standard
of their patron, as Indian chiefs in the American wars brought the
tomahawks of their tribes to the standard of France or England. Celtic
independence greatly contributed to the general perpetuation of anarchy
in Scotland, to the backwardness of Scotch civilization, and to the
abortive weakness of the Parliamentary institutions. Union with the more
powerful kingdom at last supplied the force requisite for the taming of
the Celt. Highlanders, at the bidding of Chatham's genius, became the
soldiers, and are now the pet soldiers, of the British monarchy. A
Hanoverian tailor with improving hand shaped the Highland plaid, which
had originally resembled the simple drapery of the Irish kern, into a
garb of complex beauty, well suited for fancy balls. The power of the
chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away,
though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the
clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social
picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes--at
the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered--are the favourite retreats
of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization.
After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the
Highlands, of which a great part had up to that time been little better
than heathen; but it did not fail to take a strong tinge of Celtic
enthusiasm and superstition.

Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important
politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of
nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not
sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and
kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a
monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did
not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the
menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers
which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of
desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over
Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the
interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border
war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the
extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a
savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best
government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism,
partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English,
whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted
Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation
would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not
only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a
support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of
rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious
sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great
Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no
prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could
possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and
even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a
separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their
reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably
find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining
the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James
I., "No bishop, no king!" In England the Reformation was semi-Catholic;
in Sweden it was Lutheran; but in both countries it was made by the
kings, and in both Episcopacy was retained. Where the Reformation was
the work of the people, more popular forms of Church government
prevailed. In Scotland the monarchy, always weak, was at the time of the
Reformation practically in abeyance, and the master of the movement was
emphatically a man of the people. As to the nobles, they seem to have
thought only of appropriating the Church lands, and to have been willing
to leave to the nation the spiritual gratification of settling its own
religion. Probably they also felt with regard to the disinherited
proprietors of the Church lands that "stone dead had no fellow." The
result was a democratic and thoroughly Protestant Church, which drew
into itself the highest energies, political as well as religious, of a
strong and great-hearted people, and by which Laud and his confederates,
when they had apparently overcome resistance in England, were as Milton
says, "more robustiously handled." If the Scotch auxiliaries did not win
the decisive battle of Marston Moor, they enabled the English
Parliamentarians to fight and win it. During the dark days of the
Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the
ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the
joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find
Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time
of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in
India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the
intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and
Scotland has ever since been a distinctly Liberal element in British
politics, and seems now likely to lead the way to a complete measure of
religious freedom.

Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger
island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of
the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand
lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable
annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the
less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is
entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to
govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized
morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days
when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by
a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller
island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger,
more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the
larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us
plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great
Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size
and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the
resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of
Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late
period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter
process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of
the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and
made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and
Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization,
merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected
with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the
times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic
law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in
the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical
architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is
evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life
amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The
Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest
of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious
as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned
William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission
to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block
of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his
reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church.
Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction,
and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing
the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the
Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the
case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was
complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class
which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national
nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of
Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery,
and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the
conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the
wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was
wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when
subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of
heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the
south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either
attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial
factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened
and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his
moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the
conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate
showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the
dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the
subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect
left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to
objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic
subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and
civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the result was a
military colony or Pale, between the inhabitants of which and the
natives raged a perpetual border war, as savage as that between the
settlers at the Cape and the Kaffirs, or that between the American
frontierman and the Red Indian. The religious quarrel was and has always
been secondary in importance to the struggle of the races for the land.
In the period following the conquest it was the Pale that was
distinctively Romanist; but when at the Reformation the Pale became
Protestant the natives, from antagonism of race, became more intensely
Catholic, and were drawn into the league of Catholic powers on the
Continent, in which they suffered the usual fate of the dwarf who goes
to battle with the giant. By the strong monarchy of the Tudors the
conquest of Ireland was completed with circumstances of cruelty
sufficient to plant undying hatred in the breasts of the people. But the
struggle for the land did not end there, instead of the form of conquest
it took that of confiscation, and was waged by the intruder with the
arms of legal chicane. In the form of eviction it has lasted to the
present hour; and eviction in Ireland is not like eviction in England,
where great manufacturing cities receive and employ the evicted; it is
starvation or exile. Into exile the Irish people have gone by millions,
and thus, though neither maritime nor by nature colonists, they have had
a great share in the peopling of the New World. The cities and railroads
of the United States are to a great extent the monuments of their
labour. In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced
by ages of political serfage, and are still the _debris_ of broken
clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to
follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are
instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial
oppressors in their native land. British statesmen, when they had
conceded Catholic emancipation and afterwards Disestablishment, may have
fancied that they had removed the root of the evil. But the real root
was not touched till Parliament took up the question of the land, and
effected a compromise which may perhaps have to be again revised before
complete pacification is attained.

In another way geography has exercised a sinister influence on the
fortunes of Ireland. Closely approaching Scotland, the northern coast of
Ireland in course of time invited Scotch immigration, which formed as it
were a Presbyterian Pale. If the antagonism between the English
Episcopalian and the Irish Catholic was strong, that between the Scotch
Presbyterian and the Irish Catholic was stronger. To the English
Episcopalian the Irish Catholic was a barbarian and a Romanist; to the
Scotch Presbyterian he was a Canaanite and an idolater. Nothing in
history is more hideous than the conflict in the north of Ireland in the
time of Charles I. This is the feud which has been tenacious enough of
its evil life to propagate itself even in the New World, and to renew in
the streets of Canadian cities the brutal and scandalous conflicts which
disgrace Belfast. On the other hand, through the Scotch colony, the
larger island has a second hold upon the smaller. Of all political
projects a federal union of England and Ireland with separate
Parliaments under the same Crown seems the most hopeless, at least if
government is to remain parliamentary; it may be safely said that the
normal relation between the two Parliaments would be collision, and
collision on a question of peace or war would be disruption. But an
independent Ireland might be a feasible as well as natural object of
Irish aspiration if it were not for the strength, moral as well as
numerical, of the two intrusive elements. How could the Catholic
majority be restrained from legislation which the Protestant minority
would deem oppressive? And how could the Protestant minority, being as
it is more English or Scotch than Irish, be restrained from stretching
its hands to England or Scotland for aid? It is true that if scepticism
continues to advance at its present rate, the lines of religious
separation may be obliterated or become too faint to exercise a great
practical influence, and the bond of the soil may then prevail. But the
feeling against England which is the strength of Irish Nationalism is
likely to subside at the same time.

Speculation on unfulfilled contingencies is not invariably barren. It is
interesting at all events to consider what would have been the
consequences to the people of the two islands, and humanity generally,
if a Saxon England and a Celtic Ireland had been allowed to grow up and
develop by the side of each other untouched by Norman conquest. In the
case of Ireland we should have been spared centuries of oppression which
has profoundly reacted, as oppression always does, on the character of
the oppressor; and it is difficult to believe that the Isle of Saints
and of primitive Universities would not have produced some good fruits
of its own. In the Norman conquest of England historical optimism sees a
great political and intellectual blessing beneath the disguise of
barbarous havoc and alien tyranny. The Conquest was the continuation of
the process of migratory invasions by which the nations of modern Europe
were founded, from restless ambition and cupidity, when it had ceased to
be beneficent. It was not the superposition of one primitive element of
population on another, to the ultimate advantage, possibly, of the
compound; but the destruction of a nationality, the nationality of
Alfred and Harold, of Bede and AElfric. The French were superior in
military organization; that they had superior gifts of any kind, or that
their promise was higher than that of the native English, it would not
be easy to prove. The language, we are told, is enriched by the
intrusion of the French element. If it was enriched it was shattered;
and the result is a mixture so heterogeneous as to be hardly available
for the purposes of exact thought, while the language of science is
borrowed from the Greek, and as regards the unlearned mass of the people
is hardly a medium of thought at all. There are great calamity in
history, though their effects may in time be worked off, and they may be
attended by some incidental good. Perhaps the greatest calamity in
history were the wars of Napoleon, in which some incidental good may
nevertheless be found.

To the influences of geographical position, soil, and race is to be
added, to complete the account of the physical heritage, the influence
of climate. But in the case of the British Islands we must speak not of
climate, but of climates, for within the compass of one small realm are
climates moist and comparatively dry, warm and cold, bracing and
enervating, the results of special influences the range of which is
limited. Civilized man to a great extent makes a climate for himself;
his life in the North is spent mainly indoors, where artificial heat
replaces the sun. The idea which still haunts us, that formidable vigour
and aptitude for conquest are the appanage of Northern races, is a
survival from the state in which the rigour of nature selected and
hardened the destined conquerors of the Roman Empire. The stoves of St.
Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle
between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least
vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous
state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection
must be tremendous. Of the races which peopled the British Islands the
most important had already undergone that action in their original
abodes. They would, however, still feel the beneficent influence of a
climate on the whole eminently favourable to health and to activity;
bracing, yet not so rigorous as to kill those tender plants of humanity
which often bear in them the most precious germs of civilization,
neither confining the inhabitant too much to the shelter of his
dwelling, nor, as the suns of the South are apt to do, drawing him too
much from home. The climate and the soil together formed a good school
for the character of the young nation, as they exacted the toil of the
husbandman and rewarded it. Of the varieties of temperature and weather
within the island the national character still bears the impress, though
in a degree always decreasing as the assimilating agencies of
civilization make their way. Irrespectively of the influence of special
employments, and perhaps even of peculiarity of race, mental vigour,
independence, and reasoning power are always ascribed to the people of
the North. Variety, in this as in other respects, would naturally
produce a balance of tendencies in the nation conductive to moderation
and evenness of progress.

The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems
more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but
the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to
her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while
her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military
alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of
general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that
power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the
colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England
so different from those of New France.

Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original
colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian
Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident,
compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being sought on the
other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the
quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as
in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from
America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial
races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia,
where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may
hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of
Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro.
India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as
a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so
generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less
operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant
dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own
coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war
ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to
take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the
Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not
think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked
up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do
not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable
possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities,
which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once
to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by
which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is
attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a
nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell
necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the
Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown,
was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an
army, a political system, and a morality of its own. But now it appears
that the wrongs of the Hindoo are going to be avenged, as the wrongs of
the conquered have often been, by their moral effect upon the conqueror.
A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as
an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of
Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the
imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now
stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and
commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a
career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has
never yet failed to end. At present the influences in favour of taking
the path of conquest seemed to preponderate, [Footnote: Written in
1878.] and the probability seems to be that the leadership of political
progress, which has hitherto belonged to England and has constituted the
special interest of her history, will, in the near future, pass into
other hands.