th Englishmen and
Americans are perplexed at intervals by a malice and an _acharnement_ of
hatred to England, which reads very much like that atrocious and
viperous malignity imputed to the father of Hannibal against the Romans.
It is noticeable, both as keeping open a peculiar exasperation of Irish
patriotism absurdly directed against England; as doing a very serious
injustice to Americans, who are thus misrepresented as the organs of
this violence, so exclusively Irish; and, finally, as the origin of the
monstrous delusion which I now go on to mention. The pretence of late
put forward is, that the preponderant element in the American population
is indeed derived from the British Islands, but by a vast overbalance
from Ireland, and from the Celtic part of the Irish population. This
monstrous delusion has recently received an extravagant sanction from
the London _Quarterly Review_. Half a dozen other concurrent papers, in
journals political and literary, hold the same language. And the upshot
of the whole is--that, whilst the whole English element (including the
earliest colonisation of the New England states at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, and including the whole stream of British
emigration since the French Revolution) is accredited for no more than
three and a half millions out of pretty nearly twenty millions of
_white_ American citizens, on the other hand, against this English
element, is set up an Irish (meaning a purely Hiberno-_Celtic_) element,
amounting--oh, genius of blushing, whither hast thou fled?--to a total
of eight millions. Anglo-Saxon blood, it seems, is in a miserable
minority in the United States; whilst the German blood composes, we are
told, a respectable nation of five millions; and the Irish-Celtic young
noblemen, though somewhat at a loss for shoes, already count as high as
eight millions!

Now, if there were any semblance of truth in all this, we should have
very good reason indeed to tremble for the future prospects of the
English language throughout the Union. Eight millions struggling with
three and a half should already have produced some effect on the very
composition of Congress. Meantime, against these audacious falsehoods I
observe a reasonable paper in the _Times_ (August 23, 1852), rating the
Celtic contribution from Ireland--that is, exclusively of all the
_Ulster_ contribution--at about two millions; which, however, I view as
already an exaggeration, considering the nu