Goldwin Smith Quotes
Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
Smith, Goldwin. Lectures on the Study of History, Delivered in Oxford, 1859-61. J. H. and Jas. Parker, 1861, p. 70.
Belgium is comprised of an amalgam of two separate nations and cultures, Walonia and Flanders. They spoke a different language and had very different economies and world views. Destree was distressed that few people saw themselves as Belgians—They were either Flemish or Waloons. There was at the time no concept of a nation even though there was a king and the rest of the world recognized one country.
The French were culturally not very warlike or militaristic and in the past two centuries had not been very aggressive like the British or the Germans. The Kaiser showed is ethnic ignorance in that the Anglo-Saxons were the merging of two people the English Saxons and the French who under William the Conqueror had defeated the Saxons. However, that was a common perception in racist Germany at the time. Most important however was that the Kaiser and the German military believed it and the fact that France may enter WWI against them was not taken as a serious threat so the German aggression proceeded. The French military gave Germany much more difficulty in the battlefield than they anticipated.
In revolutionary America, not only were the colonists divided into revolutionists and loyalists to Britain, but among the revolutionists, there was no uniformity of manners, ideas, norms, beliefs or any other element of politics and unity. The great challenge to America and one of its great strengths is its diversity which is not a consequence of recent immigration, but has been a characteristic of the American body politic even in the Revolutionary War. Even English was not spoken by everyone as there were French, German, Scandinavian and other immigrants who had settled in the frontier and rarely came into contact with people other than those of their own family and community. The notion of a specific American culture to which which some today believe that we should return, never existed to begin with.
Goldwin Smith was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States.
