Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog — John Shaqi
Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom DogBlatchford, Robert
Philosophy
Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog
Blatchford, Robert
Criminals; Free will and determinism
Since then the mixing has gone on, plentifully varied by intermarriage
with Irish, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Belgians, French, Italians, Poles,
and Spaniards. We have had refugees and immigrants from all parts of
Europe. We have given homes to the Huguenots, and the Emigrés from
France, to the Lollards and Lutherans from the Netherlands, to crowding
fugitives from Russia, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Greece. We have
absorbed these foreigners and taken them into our blood. And the
descendants of all these mixed races are called Englishmen.
The Londoner is a mixture of all those races, and more. From every part
of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales; from most parts of Europe, from
many parts of America and Asia, and even Africa, streams of foreign
blood have flowed in to make the Londoner.
In Yorkshire there are several distinct races, though none of them are
pure. There is one Yorkshire type bearing marks of descent from the
Norsemen, another bearing marks of descent from the Flemish and French
immigrants, and another from the Normandy invaders. I have seen Vikings,
Belgians, and Normans all playing cricket in the Yorkshire County team.
In Ireland there are Irishmen from Denmark and Norway, Irishmen from
Ancient Mongolia, and, especially in Kerry, Irishmen who seem to be of
almost pure Iberian type.
The Iberian Irishman is short, dark, aquiline, and sardonic, with black
hair and eyes, and a moustache more like a Tartar's than a European's.
The Viking Irishman is big and burly, with blue or grey eyes, and
reddish hair and beard; the difference between these two types is as
great as that between a Saxon and a Spaniard.
One of these Irish Iberians marries a Yorkshire Dane. Their son marries
the daughter of a Lancashire Belgian and an Ancient Briton from Flint;
and their children are English.
As I said just now, we think of John Smith as _all_ John Smith and
_always_ John Smith.
But John is a mixture of millions of men and women, many of them as
different from each other as John Ridd is different from Dick Swiveller,
or as Diana of the Crossways is different from Betsy Trotwood. And these
uncountable and conflicting natures are not extinct: they are alive and
busy in the motley jumble we call John Smith.
John is not all John. He is, a great deal of him, Roman soldier, Ancient
Briton, Viking pirate, Flemish weaver, Cornish fisherman, Lowland
scholar, Irish grazier, London chorus girl, Yorkshire spinner, Welsh
dairymaid, and a host of other gentle and simple, wild and tame, gay
and grave, sweet and sour, fickle and constant, lovable and repellent
ancestors; from his great-great-grandparent, the hairy treeman, with
flat feet and club like a young larch, to his respectable father, the
white-fronted, silk-hatted clerk in the Pudsey Penny Savings Bank.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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