is an example of
the general proposition I offer--the proposition that an enormous
amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the
indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these
defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of
appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or
pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is
none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

When a wealthy nation like the English discovers the perfectly patent
fact that it is making a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer
nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in consternation, and
then begins to talk about Celts and Teutons. As far as I can
understand the theory, the Irish are Celts and the English are Teutons.
Of course, the Irish are not Celts any more than the English are
Teutons. I have not followed the ethnological discussion with much
energy, but the last scientific conclusion which I read inclined on the
whole to the summary that the English were mainly Celtic and the Irish
mainly Teutonic. But no man alive, with even the glimmering of a real
scientific sense, would ever dream of applying the terms "Celtic" or
"Teutonic" to either of them in any positive or useful sense.

That sort of thing must be left to people who talk about the
Anglo-Saxon race, and extend the expression to America. How much of the
blood of the Angles and Saxons (whoever they were) there remains in our
mixed British, Roman, German, Dane, Norman, and Picard stock is a
matter only interesting to wild antiquaries. And how much of that
diluted blood can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool of America
into which a cataract of Swedes, Jews, Germans, Irishmen, and Italians
is perpetually pouring, is a matter only interesting to lunatics. It
would have been wiser for the English governing class to have called
upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least
boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for
ever; boasts of being unstable as water.

And England and the English governing class never did call on this
absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no
other god to call on. All the most genuine Englishmen in history would
have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk about
Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to substitute the ideal of rac