If there is anything in regard to which the love of friends corroborates the malice of enemies it is in ascribing to the English an individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human parallel.  The Englishman’s country is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament is a suit of armour.  The function common to all three is to keep things out, and most admirably has he used them to that end.  At first, indeed, he let everybody in; he had a perfect passion for being conquered, and Romans, Teutons, Danes, and Normans in succession plucked and ate the apple of England.  But with the coming of age of that national consciousness, the bonds of which have never been snapped, the English entered on their lucky and courageous career of keeping things out.  They possess in London the only European capital that has never in the modern period been captured by an invader.  They withstood the intellectual grandeur of Roman Law, and developed their own medley of customs into the most eccentric and most equitable system in the world.  They kept out the Council of Trent, and the Spanish Armada.  They kept out the French Revolution, and Napoleon.  They kept out for a long time the Kantian philosophy, Romanticism, Pessimism, Higher Criticism, German music, French painting, and one knows not how many other of the intellectual experiments that made life worth living, or not worth living, to nineteenth-century Europe.  Their insularity, spiritual as well as geographical, has whetted the edge of a thousand flouts and gibes.  “Those stupid French!” exclaims the sailor, as reported by De Morgan:  “Why do they go on calling a cabbage a shoe when they must know that it is a cabbage?” This was in general the attitude of what Mr Newbolt has styled the “Island Race” when on its travels.  Everybody has laughed at the comedy of it, but no one has sufficiently applauded its success.  The English tourist declined to be at the trouble of speaking any foreign tongue whatsoever; instantly every hotel and restaurant on the Continent was forced to learn English.  He refused to read their books; a Leipsic firm at once started to publish his own, and sold him his six-shilling Clapham novels in Lucerne for two francs.  He dismissed with indignation the idea of breakfasting on a roll, and bacon and eggs were added unto him.  In short, by a straightforward policy of studying nobody else, he compelled everybody else to study him.

Now it is idle to deny this performance the applause which it plainly deserves.  The self-evolution of England, as it may perhaps be called, in its economic, political, and literary life, offers an admirable model of concentration and energy.  Even where it is a case of obtuseness to other civilisations, at least as high but of a different type, the verdict cannot be wholly unfavourable.  The Kingdom of Earth is to the thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct vital value.  A man, too sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of futility.