8. British and Foreign

Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybody
and everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us,
human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of time
we and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggy
isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and women of us. Some of
us, no doubt, are more or less remotely of Norman blood, and came over,
like that noble family the Slys, with Richard Conqueror. Others of us,
perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a couple of
generations earlier, to the bare-legged followers of Canute and Guthrum.
Yet others, once more, are true Saxon Englishmen, descendants of
Hengest, if there ever was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsa
ever actually existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any just
right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons;
they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as the
Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italian
organ-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But
surely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable
Britishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit of
it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into the
remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of Germany, and fixes in
shadowy hypothetical numbers the exact date, to a few centuries, of the
first prehistoric Gaelic invasion. Even the still earlier brown
Euskarians and yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent of
the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very Autochthones
in person turn out, on close inspection, to be vagabonds and wanderers
and foreign colonists. In short, man as a whole is not an indigenous
animal at all in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push his
pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always arriving in the
end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich packet. Five years, in fact, are
quite sufficient to give him a legal title to letters of naturalisation,
unless indeed he be a German grand-duke, in which case he can always
become an Englishman off-hand by Act of Parliament.

It is just the same with all the other animals and plants that now
inhabit these isles of Britain. If there be anything at all with a claim
to be considered really indigenous, it is the Scotch ptarmigan and the
Alpine hare, the northern holygrass and the mountain flowers of the
Highland summits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought
across as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane, at various
times to the United Kingdom, some of them recently, some of them long
ago, but not one of them (it seems), except the