Ch. 1 - The Foreigner at Home

"This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such
thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to
inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different
stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its
extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to
the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of
Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad;
there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered
so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains
still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the
other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show
in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea
Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the
ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home
country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition. You may
go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion
and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese - you shall
scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty
miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the
hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has
gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms
of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its
own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local
custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on
into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO,
foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his
neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a
domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but
neither curious nor quick about the life of others. In French
colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an
immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated
race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a
transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the
Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance. He
figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same
disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm