was
exceptional, monstrous. If not exceptional, monstrous, why should this
particular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably in their memories?
Finally,--and to be as curt as the question deserves--the Celtic Briton
in the island was not exterminated and never came near to being
exterminated: but on the contrary, remains equipollent with the Saxon in
our blood, and perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we call
Iberian, which came before either and endures in this island to-day, as
anyone travelling it with eyes in his head can see. Pict, Dane, Norman,
Frisian, Huguenot French--these and others come in. If mixture of blood
be a shame, we have purchased at the price of that shame the glory of
catholicism; and I know of nothing more false in science or more actively
poisonous in politics or in the arts than the assumption that we belong
as a race to the Teutonic family.

Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot--they all come in. And will you
refuse a hearing when I claim that the Roman came in too? Bethink you how
deeply Rome engraved itself on this island and its features. Bethink you
that, as human nature is, no conquering race ever lived or could
live--even in garrison--among a tributary one without begetting children
on it. Bethink you yet further of Freeman's admission that in the
wholesale (and quite hypothetical) general massacre 'the women doubtless
would be largely spared'; and you advance nearer to my point. I see a
people which for four hundred years was permeated by Rome. If you insist
on its being a Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you have one
which _alone of Teutonic peoples_ has inherited the Roman gift of
consolidating conquest, of colonising in the wake of its armies; of
driving the road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under its
sense of law. I see that this nation of ours concurrently, when it seeks
back to what alone can inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back,
not to any supposed native North, but south to the Middle Sea of our
civilisation and steadily to Italy, which we understand far more easily
than France--though France has helped us times and again. Putting these
things together, I retort upon the ethnologists--for I come from the
West of England, where we suffer incredible things from them--_'Semper
ego auditor tantum?'_ I hazard that the most important thing in our
blood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome.

You must, of course, tak