The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations — John Shaqi
The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking NationsKennedy, Sinclair
History
The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations
Kennedy, Sinclair
Anglo-Saxon race; Great Britain -- Colonies; Great Britain -- Relations -- United States; United States -- Relations -- Great Britain
If an intelligent traveller from Mars were to tour the earth
to-day he would jot down in his note-book that New Zealand,
Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, Canada, the British
Isles, and the United States were all inhabited by the same sort
of people. Their language, their forms of government, their ways
of thinking and of conducting the various departments of life
would lead him to think so. And he would be right. The
English-speaking traveller, denied the point of view of an
outsider, is prone to take the likenesses for granted and to
dwell on the differences, using his own local group as a
yard-stick to measure the rest. Beneath his criticism, however,
he is conscious that in these countries he is at home in the
same sense that he is an alien in all others. Whichever of the
seven he may be from, he finds in each of the other six, men he
can hardly tell from himself, and realizes that in his own
political unit, whose oneness he never questions, there are
communities with natures more dissimilar than are the natures of
these seven nations. No knowledge of history is needed for
either him or the Martian to conclude that while they use
different names to designate this part or that, {22} they are
speaking always of one people and one civilization.
Of what stuffs the English-speaking people were fashioned has
already been explained. England, when colonization began, held
the germ of the future Pan-Angles. Within two centuries Scotland
and Ireland were united with England and Wales under one
government, and the English language and English ideals
penetrated further and further into those once Celtic
strongholds. Welsh, Scots, and Irish brought their contributions
to our development. They wrote English poems and English books.
They officered the army and built battleships. They made and
administered laws, and furnished prime ministers for the British
Isles. Like the Englanders they too migrated to the new
Pan-Angle lands, seeking religious or political liberty in some
cases, but oftenest seeking the means of a more satisfactory
life. These they have found. By this blending of all British
Isles stocks came new vitality to the Pan-Angles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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