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THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIL.
By CHARLES FISK BEACH, Jr.
Mr. Charles Fisk Beach, Jr., an eminent
lawyer and author of a dozen standard
works on law, who has had experience
and practice in London as well as in the
United States, and whose books are pub-
lished in both countries, writing on “The
Anglo-Saxon Peril” in Out West for
April, 1903, said:
“In these last days much loose and un-
considered talk is going about in this
country upon the subject of a so-called
Anglo-Saxon world domination, and many
of our people, who read the newspapers
more than they think, seem somehow to
have absorbed the notion that it is all
very true, and all very nice, forsooth, that
in the new century the Anglo-Saxon race
—whatever that is—is ‘to inherit the
earth, and is to do to death all other
and degenerate folk, the degeneracy and
the decadence of all the other nations of
the earth being duly assumed as a neces-
sary major premise. It should seem that
only a little reflection and analysis and
some exact speech ought to make an end
of this fatuous idea, and that only a dull
point should easily suffice to prick a. bub-
ble so ill-inflated and so big with mis-
chief. If all who talk without knowledge
about the Anglo-Saxon race, and assume
for verity all the nonsense they see in the
newspapers about it, knew exactly what
an Anglo-Saxon is, and what he is not,
and why this talk is abroad in.the earth,
and could be made to realize to what na-
tional and international disorder and mis-
chief it tends, we might have less of it
in future. It is as a contribution to na-
tional sanity on this subject that this ar-
ticle is written.
“When an American plumes _ himself
upon his Anglo-Saxon extraction and in-
flates himself with the idea, it is more
than a thousand to one that he is guess-
ing—and guessing wrong. If, in any in-
dividual case, all the necessary assump-
tions happen, by the barest chance, to be
correct, it comes precisely and only to this,
that in the particular case the individual
traces his lineage backward sonre dozens
of generations to an ancestor, or group of
ancestors, who, when first heard of, were
half-naked savages in the woods of Ger-
many—Saxons, Angles or Jutes—tribes of
people distinctly inferior in civilization to
their Southern and Western neighbors.
After their settlement in England and a
wild and barbarous existence there for
some centuries, during which of them-
selves they made little progress in any
direction—all the recent Alfred millen-
ary rubbish to the contrary notwithstand-
ing—they were ultimately subjugated and
civilized by people from the north of
France, who imposed upon them their
name, their language, their religion, their
law and their enlightenment. Whatever
they have subsequently attained is the di-
rect and immediate outcome of the civili-
zation imported from Normandy and Brit-
tany, and imposed upon them with an
iron hand from Rouen and Rome. After
a period of vassalage to their Frankish
masters, these anglicized German savages
came to be the middle, lower middle, and
peasant, stock of the British islands.
Wearing for many generations very awk-
wardly the civilization that had come to
them from across the channel, they finally
came to stand upon their own feet, a com-
pact, serious, dull stock of people, having
indeed, like every other race of mankind
that has come to the front, their virtues,
their excellencies and their limitations—
not worse, perhaps, but certainly not bet-
ter, than the races from which they had
derived their civilization. From about
the eleventh century,.when the world was
created (for them) to this present, they
have in general followed, and not led, in
the march toward higher and _ better
things; and it is the most untaught and
insular conceit to pretend for them as a
stock any essential pre-eminence. When
you say that they are strong and serious,
and not in general below a fair average
of humanity, and that in their deyelopment
they have been exceptionally fortunate in
their isolation, you have said it all. If
you are an Anglo-Saxon, my brother man,
that is about what you are in point of
genesis and genealogy
“To prate about the Anglo-Saxon race
in the prevailing fashion is, as a matter
of common knowledge, childish and ab-
surd; and as a matter of morals, less de-
fensible than any other propaganda of
race hatred that ever was heard of. It
makes fools of people who believe that
it imputes to them any peculiar racial
sanctity or excellence, and its only and
inevitable tendency abroad is to pit race
against race in a most hateful and per-
nicious fashion, to stir up strife in the
world, and to set the nations by the ears,
No informed and no patriotic human be-
ing ought to be a party to it. Anglo-
Saxonism, in its whole length and breadth,
is wholly unimportant, so far as it has
any basis of fact, and utterly mischief-
making, if pressed. Whatever shadowy
excuse or necessity there may be for it
in the British Islands, there is no room
for it in America. Few heresies can be
further from the truth than the pretence
that the eighty millions or so of human
TT
