BRITISH AND FOREIGN 123 



BRITISH AND FOREIGN 



STRICTLY speaking, there is nothing really and truly 

 British ; everybody and everything is a naturalised alien. 

 Viewed as Britons, we all of us, human and animal, differ 

 from one another simply in the length of time we and our 

 ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and 

 foggy isle of Britain. Look, for example, at the men and 

 women of us. Some of us, no doubt, are more or less re- 

 motely of Norman blood, and came over, like that noble 

 family the Slys, with Kichard Conqueror. Others of us, 

 perhaps, are in the main Scandinavian, and date back a 

 couple of generations earlier, to the bare-legged followers 

 of Canute and Guthrum. Yet others, once more, are true 

 Saxon Englishmen, descendants of Hengest, if there ever 

 was a Hengest, or of Horsa, if a genuine Horsa ever actually 

 existed. None of these, it is quite clear, have any just 

 right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born 

 Britons ; they are all of them just as much foreigners at 

 bottom as the Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembroke- 

 shire Flemings, the Italian organ-boy and the Hindoo prince 

 disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But surely the Welshman 

 and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable Britishers, 

 sprung from the soil and to the manner born ! Not a bit 

 of it ; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly 

 into the remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of 

 Germany, and fixes in shadowy hypothetical numbers the 

 exact date, to a few centuries, of the first prehistoric Gaelic 



