Post-Prandial Philosophy

18. The Celtic Fringe

We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.

What is that you mutter? "A very inopportune moment to proclaim the

fact." Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm sorry to hear you say it, for

if there _is_ a quality on which I plume myself, it's the delicate tact

that makes me refrain from irritating the susceptibilities of the

sensitive Saxon. See how polite I am to him! I call him sensitive. But,

opportune or inopportune, Lord Salisbury says we are a Celtic fringe. I

beg to retort, we are the British people.

"Conquered races," say my friends. Well, grant it for a moment. But in

civilised societies, conquerors have, sooner or later, to amalgamate

with the conquered. And where the vanquished are more numerous, they

absorb the victors instead of being absorbed by them. That is the

Nemesis of conquest. Rome annexed Etruria; and Etruscan M*****,

Etruscan Sejanus organised and consolidated the Roman Empire. Rome

annexed Italy; and the _Jus Italicum_ grew at last to be the full Roman

franchise. Rome annexed the civilised world; and the provinces under

C*** blotted out the Senate. Britain is passing now through the

self-same stage. One inevitable result of the widening of the electorate

has been the transfer of power from the Teutonic to the Celtic half of

Britain. I repeat, we are no longer a Celtic fringe: at the polls, in

Parliament, we are the British people. Lord Salisbury may fail to

perceive that fact, or, as I hold more probable, may affect to ignore

it. What will such tactics avail? The ostrich is not usually counted

among men as a perfect model of political wisdom.

And _are_ we, after all, the conquered peoples? Meseems, I doubt it.

They say we Celts dearly love a paradox--which is perhaps only the

sensible Saxon way of envisaging the fact that we catch at new truths

somewhat quicker than other people. At any rate, 'tis a pet little

paradox of my own that we have never been conquered, and that to our

unconquered state we owe in the main our Radicalism, our Socialism, our

ingrained love of political freedom. We are tribal not feudal; we think

the folk more important than his lordship. The Saxon of the south-east

is the conquered man: he has felt on his neck for generations the heel

of feudalism. He is slavish; he is snobbish; he dearly loves a lord. He

shouts himself hoarse for his Beaconsfield or his Salisbury. Till

lately, in his rural avatar, he sang but one song--

"God bless the squire and his relations,

And keep us in our proper stations."

Trite, isn't it? but so is the Saxon intelligence.

Seriously--for at times it is well to be serious--South-Eastern England,

the England of the plains, has been conquered and enslaved in a dozen

ages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knows

what shadowy Belg and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serve

our purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hibernia

free, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. The

Saxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over the

watershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon in

East Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a common

servitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudal

system--the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, Teutonic

England was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it had

accommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for the

assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where

leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves

them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man,

who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill.

With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall,

the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed than

conquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset,

Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages to

explain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in the

Shocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the origin

and evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that the

Devonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon for

resistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxon

kingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the English

monarchy--one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury.

Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughly

annexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under the

Welsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised.

Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, the

Rebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaseless

reaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alien

Church" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District and

Ayrshire--Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde--only accepted by degrees the

supremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a Scotch

King was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King was

Prince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. of

Scotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria was

no more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered by

the accession of James I. or by the Act of Union. That means absorption,

conciliation, a certain degree of tribal independence. For Ireland, we

know that the "mere Irish" were never subjugated at all till the days of

Henry VII.; that they had to be reconquered by Cromwell and by William

of Orange; that they rebelled more or less throughout the eighteenth

century; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory England

through the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held out

against the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty;

and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon.

General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a few

trifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it was

only for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark and

the crofters are its mode of expressing itself.

Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, I

am not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race.

I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of the

unconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozen

races; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pict

of Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speak

of Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper and

common to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised and

contented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, the

Scotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, free

men every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without upon

the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside,

has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the

native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been

brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the

west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.

As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxon

lowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and most

of the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance of

realising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the present

century has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance of

power from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; from

the agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cotton

factories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up in

the Celtic or semi-Celtic area--Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds,

Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt--that is to

say, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country--reproduces

his kind much more rapidly than the Teuton. The Highlander and the

Irishman swarm into Glasgow; the Irishman and the Welshman swarm into

Liverpool; the west-countryman into Bristol; Celts of all types into

London, Southampton, Newport, Birmingham, Sheffield. This eastward

return-wave of Celts upon the Teuton has leavened the whole mass; if you

look at the leaders of Radicalism in England you will find they bear,

almost without exception, true Celtic surnames. Chartists and Socialists

of the first generation were marshalled by men of Cymric descent, like

Ernest Jones and Robert Owen, or by pure-blooded Irishmen like Fergus

O'Connor. It is not a mere accident that the London Socialists of the

present day should be led by Welshmen like William Morris, or by the

eloquent brogue of Bernard Shaw's audacious oratory. We Celts now lurk

in every corner of Britain; we have permeated it with our ideas; we have

inspired it with our aspirations; we have roused the Celtic remnant in

the south-east itself to a sense of their wrongs; and we are marching

to-day, all abreast, to the overthrow of feudalism. If Lord Salisbury

thinks we are a Celtic fringe he is vastly mistaken. But he doesn't

really think so: 'tis a piece of his ponderous Saxon humour. Talk of

"Batavian grace," indeed! Well, the Cecils came first from the fens of

Lincolnshire.