cracy. And it is
peculiarly Saxon in its origin,--not derived from the Celt or Norman or
Dane. These latter belonged (as do the peoples sprung from, or allied
to, them to-day) to that class of people which places the community
above the individual, which looks instinctively to the State or the
government for initiative. The Saxons alone (a people of earnest
individual workers, agriculturalists and craftsmen) relied always on the
initiative and impulse of the individual--what M. Demolins calls "the
law of intense personal labour"--and it was by virtue of this quality
that they eventually won social supremacy over the other races in
Britain. It is by virtue of the same quality that the Americans have
been enabled to subdue their continent and build up the fabric of the
United States. It is this quality, says the French writer almost
brutally, which makes the German and Latin races to-day stand to
_L'Anglais_ in about the same relation as the Oriental and the Redskin
stand to the European. And when M. Demolins speaks of _L'Anglais_, he
means the American as much as the "Englishman of Britain." It is a
convenient term and, so essentially one are they in his eyes, there is
no need to distinguish between the peoples. Mr. William Archer's remark
is worth quoting, that "It is amazing how unessential has been the
change produced in the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament [in America] by
the influences of climate or the admixtures of foreign blood."[38:1]

When individual Englishmen and Americans are thrown together in strange
parts of the world, they seldom fail to foregather as members of one
race. There may be four traders living isolated in some remote port; but
though the Russian may speak English with less "accent" than the
American and though the German may have lived for some years in New
York, it is not to the society of the German or the Russian that the
American or the Englishman instinctively turns for companionship. The
two former have but the common terms of speech; the Englishman and the
American use also common terms of thought and feeling.

The people who know this best are the officers and men of the British
and American navies, who are accustomed to find themselves thrown with
the sailors of all nations in all sorts of waters; and wherever they are
thus thrown together, the men who sail under the Stars and Stripes and
those who fly the Union Jack are friends. I have talked with a good many
British sailors (not of