stocks, each of which show well-differentiated physical characters. These human stocks were united by a common tongue. By war and conquest the empire surrounded itself—isolated itself—by a ring of enemies. The Germans carried their frontiers beyond the limits of their speech and set out to make Danes, Frenchmen, and Poles members of their own nationality. They sought to strengthen their national frontiers by tariff barricades. They linked themselves together by the multiplication of means of rapid transit and fostered the growth of a national or tribal spirit by active, persistent, and widespread tribal propaganda. The tribal spirit, which is an innate quality of every people, was roused to such a pitch that in the crisis of war the national or tribal bonds held; sixty millions of people acted as if they were members of a Highland clan. Even defeat, if it has loosened, has not broken the national bonds which were forged by the governing classes of Germany.

In all these processes of national fusion, as in the formation of all trusts in the modern commercial world, the anthropologist observes that the operation commences from above and works downwards through the mass of the people. The governing class plays upon and fans into flame the tribal embers of the popular mind. It is altogether a different process which brings about the disruption of a nationality. Disruption has nothing to do with race; the nearer the blood relationship between two adjacent peoples the more likely is disruption to occur. We can find no better illustration of this truth than when we cross the Baltic from Germany to Scandinavia. The people of Norway and Sweden are of the same racial composition; they have many interests in common; union should have given strength. Yet after a partnership which lasted for less than a century, they agreed to separate. In this case the movement came from below; a tribal feeling which swept through the people of Norway compelled a disruption. All the natural inherited forces in a people tend towards disruption. Only when reason takes the helm can these natural disruptive forces be overcome and the process of fusion be effected.

British National Problems

Having thus made a hurried survey of some of the more instructive, racial, and national problems abroad we now return homewards to apply the knowledge thus gained to the understanding of the national manifestations of our own countrymen. There is no need to remind you that the national spirit of Robert Boyle's native country is always boiling up, often boiling over. Scotland, too, has a national spirit, so has Wales; in both countries this spirit is separatist in its essence, but the national instinctive tendencies are curbed and guided by the higher reasoning centres of the brain. In England itself the sense of nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without stirs this gigantic force into life. In Ireland the national kettle is kept always on the boil; in Scotland and Wales it is kept simmering; in England, on the other hand, it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless English nationality is a force which pervades the whole population lying between Berwick-on-Tweed and Land's End. In the course of centuries statesmanship has succeeded in raising up in the minds of all the inhabitants of the British Isles—all save in the greater part of Ireland—a new and wider sense of nationality, a spirit of British nationality. Why we never succeeded in raising that spirit in the whole of Ireland represents the major part of our present quest.

Are Celts and Saxons of different Racial Stocks?

At the outset of our inquiry we are met by the ancient belief that the British Isles are divided by a racial frontier which separates the western or Celtic peoples from the eastern inhabitants of Saxon origin. It was my fortune to be born on the border of the Celtic fringe, and no one growing up under these circumstances can fail to realize that the Celtic spirit is a real and live force. Is it a racial antagonism which is elicited when Celt and Saxon are in conflict? What is the physical difference between a Celt and a Saxon? That is a matter to which I have given my attention for some years, and the results of my inquiries I will place before you as briefly as I may. In the audience now before me there are certain to be pure representatives of all our four nationalities; Celts and Saxons as pure as any in the country are sure to be present in any university audience. But except for a trick of speech or a local mannerism, the most expert anthropologist cannot tell Celt from Saxon or an Irishman from a Scotsman. There are, to be sure, certain physical types which prevail in one country more than in another, but I do not know of any feature of the body or any trait of the mind, or of any combination of features or traits which will permit an expert, on surveying groups of university students, to say this group is from Scotland, that from Wales, the third from Ireland, and the fourth from England. In stature and in colouring, in form of skull and of face, elaborate trials have revealed national difference only of the most minor kind. Nay, we know very well the physical features of the Saxon pioneers who became the masters of England and dominated the lowlands of Scotland. Their graveyards have been examined by the score, but it is not by the form of the skulls and the strength of the limb bones that we know we are dealing with the graves of ancient Saxons, but by the implements, ornaments, and utensils which were buried with them. As regards shape of skull or form of bones I do not think a practised craniologist could distinguish the skulls and bones found in an ancient Saxon cemetery in Surrey from the remains of a Celtic grave in Connemara, so much are Celtic and Saxon types alike. Were we to dress one group of fishermen from the coast of Norfolk and another from the shores of Connaught in the same garb, I do not think there is an anthropologist in Europe who by mere inspection could tell the Irish from the English group. From a physical point of view the Celt and Saxon are one; whatever be the source of their mutual antagonism, it does not lie in a difference of race. It is often said that we British are a mixed and mongrel collection of types and breeds; the truth is that as regards physical type the inhabitants of the British Isles are the most uniform of all the large nationalities of Europe.

All British Nationalities are of the North Sea Stock

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