id="id00114">[16-2] Whitaker's Almanack, London, 1913, pp.479, 646: 16,897,126 square miles and 535,753,952 persons.

[17-1] An Analysis of the System of Government throughout the British Empire, London, 1912, p. v, gives the Roman Empire population as eighty-five millions and the British Empire as four hundred and ten millions. But see Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London, 1782, vol. i. pp. 51, 52: "We are informed, that when the emperor Claudius exercised the office of censor, he took an account of six millions nine hundred and forty-five thousand Roman citizens, . . . it seems probable, that there existed, in the time of Claudius, about twice as many provincials as there were citizens, . . . and that the slaves were at least equal in number to the free inhabitants of the Roman world. The total amount of this imperfect calculation would rise to about one hundred and twenty millions of persons."

[17-2] Cf. post, p. 81, note 1.

[18-1] Cf. Ency. Brit., vol. ix. p. 588.

[18-2] Price Collier, England and the English, London, 1911, p. 341.

[19-1] As to quoted passages, the reader is cautioned to distinguish in each instance the meanings of the terms England, Britain, Great Britain, British, Britannic, etc. The usage in one quotation may differ from that in another and from that in the non-quoted passages. The terminology in the latter has been adopted to accord with the most accurate and consistent present usage. The only innovation in terms here employed is the word Pan-Angles.

[19-2] Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot, iv.: "I marvel what blood thou art—neither Englander nor Scot," quoted in New English Dictionary, Oxford, 1891—"Englander."

[19-3] Ency. Brit., vol. xii. p. 566.

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II

THE PEOPLE

If an intelligent traveller from Mars were to tour the earth to-day he would jot down in his note-book that New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, Canada, the British Isles, and the United States were all inhabited by the same sort of people. Their language, their forms of government, their ways of thinking and of conducting the various departments of life would lead him to think so. And he would be right. The English-speaking traveller, denied the point of view of an outsider, is prone to take the likenesses for granted and to dwell on the differences, using his own local group as a yard-stick to measure the rest. Beneath his criticism, however, he is conscious that in these countries he is at home in the same sense that he is an alien in all others. Whichever of the seven he may be from, he finds in each of the other six, men he can hardly tell from himself, and realizes that in his own political unit, whose oneness he never questions, there are communities with natures more dissimilar than are the natures of these seven nations. No knowledge of history is needed for either him or the Martian to conclude that while they use different names to designate this part or that, {22} they are speaking always of one people and one civilization.

Of what stuffs the English-speaking people were fashioned has already been explained. England, when colonization began, held the germ of the future Pan-Angles. Within two centuries Scotland and Ireland were united with England and Wales under one government, and the English language and English ideals penetrated further and further into those once Celtic strongholds. Welsh, Scots, and Irish brought their contributions to our development. They wrote English poems and English books. They officered the army and built battleships. They made and administered laws, and furnished prime ministers for the British Isles. Like the Englanders they too migrated to the new Pan-Angle lands, seeking religious or political liberty in some cases, but oftenest seeking the means of a more satisfactory life. These they have found. By this blending of all British Isles stocks came new vitality to the Pan-Angles.

Three centuries ago this diffusion of Britishers began, and it continues to-day in far greater numbers than then.[22-1] Nor have they come less to the United States since it became independent of Great Britain.[22-2] {23} A French student divides the American people into two groups: those whose ancestors were in the United States previous to 1830, and hence almost totally British, and those descended from persons immigrating since that time. The former, according to his computation, comprises more than one-half of the present population of the United States. And of the latter, one-third at least are likewise of British stock. A total of two-thirds, or perhaps even of three-fourths, of the American people to-day are, he concludes, the descendants of Britishers.[23-1] The Irish he considers an important element. Of the result of the mingled immigrations of the Irish and other Celts with the Scandinavians and Germans, an American student says: "When we remember that it was the crossing of the Germanic and the Celtic stocks that produced the English race itself, we are obliged to assume that the future American people will be substantially the same human stuff that created the English common law, founded parliamentary institutions, established American self-government, and framed the Constitution of the United States."[23-2] Of all Pan-Angles a tremendous majority are of British descent. Of all Pan-Angles outside the British Isles a majority are still of British descent; and theirs has been the influence that has made six new nations vastly alike, and like, also, to the Mother Country.

In some instances, notably in Canada and in South Africa, the Pan-Angles found on their {24} arrival other peoples, sprung from European stocks, firmly rooted to the land. Descendants of these first settlers still form communities apart, in which one hears English less often than French or Taal, as the case may be; much as one finds communities in the British Isles where only a form of Celtic is spoken. In other places, too, as in New York and London, are little foreign nuclei engaged in some particular trade, where a man can live and earn his wage and know no English. These are, however, the remarked exceptions.

British blood, moreover, has not in the meantime been stagnant. Through these centuries, as from earliest history, it has been constantly enriched and invigorated by admixtures from the continent of Europe. To the British Isles, South Africa, Newfoundland, Canada, and the United States, non-British peoples have come. Even New Zealand and Australia, almost purely British as they are, have their French and German settlements respectively. In the British Isles the reception and absorption of foreign stocks has been unspectacular. Individuals, or from time to time groups, seeking the larger tolerance of England, have taken up an abode there. One has but to observe and listen in the streets to be convinced that foreign invaders, though with no hostile intent, still land on British soil. Outside the British Isles, this replenishing of the British stock by "foreign" immigrants often presents features that are spectacular—especially where the bulk of the foreigners now arrive—in the United States and Canada.[24-1]

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The immigrant often comes with no ability to speak English or to understand the habits of mind and forms of government of those who do. He may never have been proudly conscious of any nationality. But in an amazingly brief length of time, we find him taking his place among his Pan-Angle fellows and conducting himself as one of them. In one generation he is transformed into a Pan-Angle.

This process of assimilation was formerly unconscious on the part of the receiving nations. Now, as