The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01Brann, William Cowper
General
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
That the Irish race is deficient in the organizing faculty is a
great discovery, and I would advise President Winston
to apply for a patent. John Bull will prove himself
ungrateful indeed if he neglects to pension him for having
demonstrated that those Irish organizations which, for half a
century have kept his public servants looking under their
beds o' nights for things neither ornamental nor useful,
were mere Fata Morganas, Brocken specters or disease of
the imagination. Winston has evidently been misled by a
mere than Boeotian ignorance blithely footing it hand-in-
hand with a vivid anti-Celtic imagination. He does not know
that Ireland was the seat of learning and the expounder of
law, both human and divine, when the rest of Europe was a
wide-weltering chaos in which shrieked the demons
Ignorance and Disorder. He was oblivious of the fact that
the American people--the master organizers of the age--are
far more Irish than English. You can scarce scratch an
American babe of the third generation without drawing
Celtic blood. Strange that the only Federal regiment which
did not go to pieces at the Battle of Bull Run, though
occupying the hottest part of the field--was composed of
these very Irishmen who are incapable of organization!
McClellan, the greatest military organizer of modern times--
though by no means the ablest commander--was of Celtic
extraction, as was the Duke of Wellington, as are the men
at the head of the British and American armies to-day.
Were President Winston better informed he would not talk
so glibly of what the "English race" has done for literature.
No Englishman of pure Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon-
Norman lineage has ever reached the front rank in the
great Republic of Letters. In Art and Science, in Oratory
and Music--even in War and Commerce--they have had to
content themselves with walking well to the rear of the
band-wagon. Shakespeare was of Welsh descent, but
whether of Celtic or Cimbric stock it were difficult to
determine. The Cimbri and Celts are both very ancient
races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the
survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders.
Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents.
Byron, "Rare" Ben Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver
Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Louis
Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and
Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore,
Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are
Balfe and Sullivan, the musical composers. Disraeli was a
Jew. The genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remain to be
traced. That the original Duke of Marlborough was an
Englishman by birth and breeding "goes without saying."
He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have
robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of belles-lettres
John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet-
laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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