Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
History
Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- 19th century; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages around the world
While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New
Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts
are opposed to this portentous theory. They are going West. The unrest
of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country‘s present,
that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to
New York because it lies away from Ireland; the Englishman takes it upon
his road to California.
Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their
nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for
these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the
country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the
other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the
Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the
English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander‘s
descendants in New York are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons
should be Irish.
As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years,
the results are already clear: if you see a Saxon face upon the
Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw
English lad bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not
lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and
beard: men may be swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the
Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers; yet not
one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as
fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern
counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the Sussex
eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England
are sprung from those of the “associated counties,” but the victors of
Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy Protestants,
the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our
ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New
Amsterdam--the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The
fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their
impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than
are the color of their eyes and beard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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