What the Anglo-Saxon has done, he has memorialized.  And by Anglo-Saxon is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of the Western Ocean.  Anglo-Saxon stands for the English-speaking people of all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more peculiarly and definitely English than anything else.  This people Kipling has sung.  Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the genius of the race.  And this is the cosmic quality.  Both that which is true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into his art-forms.  He has caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and which will not be sung out in a day.

The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber.  Underneath his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan’s time, in Drake’s time, in William’s time, in Alfred’s time.  The blood and the tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins.  In battle he is subject to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old.  Plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably.  The schoolboy of to-day dreams the dream of Clive and Hastings.  The Anglo-Saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he possesses a primitive brutality all his own.  There is a discontent in his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea.  He does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term “bulldog” is attached to him, so that all may know his unreasonableness.  He has “some care as to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle with intellectual phantasmagoria.”  He loves freedom, but is dictatorial to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for himself.  He is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, and an administrator of justice.

And in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation.  Being the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different from all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently.  But blood will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy, he has gone out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and fat revenues, and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise and superior machinery.