John Bull's insularity of character is the natural result of his strong frontier. Else where the types of humanity merge gradually where political frontiers are crossed. In some respects this contrast between the British and the continental peoples was in the past even more obvious than to-day. Not only, on the one hand, is the traffic over the seas more fre quent now, and Britain's isolation in time of peace less marked, but on the other hand, the change at the conventional continental frontier has been emphasized owing to the centralized character of the moderngreat state. Ever since the days of the first Edward, the English man has felt himself a foreigner from the moment that he landed at Calais or Boulogne.
2. Shallow Surrounding Brit ish Isles are the emergent portions of a great shoal known as the Continental Shelf, which stands out seaward from the mainland coast. Precisely as waves grow taller until they break on the foreshore, so the tides, which measure in mid-ocean only some two or three feet in amplitude, are magnified several fold as they pass on to the British shoal. Strong currents are thus generated as the wide British seas alternately deepen and drain low. Caesar bore eloquent testimony to' the influence of our tidal currents in the defeat of his strategy. The British tides, however, have had a uniting as well as a disuniting influence. Streams and streamlets whose mouths in other parts of the world would be mere creeks without fame, in these seas bear the historic names of Thames and Severn, Rhine and Seine. Even in the days of steam motive power, the flow and ebb of the Thames to and past London are worth much money annually—a fact which is one of the chief arguments against the scheme often proposed for erecting a dam below the metro polis and so keeping the water permanently high. What the tides were in the days before steam is evident from the position, many miles from the open sea of such ports as London, Antwerp and Hamburg.
Nor must it be forgotten that the shallow seas around Britain are exceptionally produc tive of fish. The fishermen of Holland became the carriers from Lisbon to the Baltic, and when Lisbon fell temporarily under the power of Spain, they same Dutchmen extended their voyages to the Indies. To-day, however, the fishermen of England and Scotland are in a great majority on the international fishing grounds of the North Sea, and their powerful steam fishing vessels extend their operations as far as Iceland on the one hand and the coast of Morocco on the other. It is an important fact for a state whose power is on the sea that there are• no fewer than 100,000 English, Scotch and Irish who earn their living wholly or in part by sea fishing.
3. Neighborhood to the Continent.— Britain would have had small significance in the world had her position been distant from the historic shores of Europe. It is of course true that the ancient writers from Virgil to Shakespeare are full of the remoteness of Britain at the end of the known world. It is true also that until a relatively late period in history Britain did not count among the powers which shaped the destiny of mankind. These very facts however have enabled Britain to play a part in the last two or three centuries which is comparable to that played by the Greeks on the smaller stage of the earlier time. Because of her neighborhood to Europe, Britain was deeply and repeatedly influenced from several distinct quarters, yet because of her insularity was never permanently attached to any one centre of European culture. It has been Britain's function to amalgamate the sev eral elements of European civilization, and then to spread Europe to all the shores of the world. At least four streams of blood— Neolithic, Celtic, Roman and Teutonic—and four lin guistic influences, all drawn from across the narrow seas, have gone to the making of modern Britain. Yet the Englishman of to day differs generically from all the species of continental European. Britain has been and is of Europe yet not in Europe.
From this point of view it is important also to notice that the hilly parts of the British Isles are in the north and the west — toward the ocean is to say, not toward the Continent. As a result, the agricultural England of the plain, the dominant partner in the United King dom, lies toward the channel, and London is close neighbor to Paris and the Netherlands. History would have been far other than it has been had the hills been in the southeast and the plains in the north and west.
4. Relation to the Chief Linguistic Frontier of glance at a map of Europe showing the areas occupied by the several lan guages would make it clear that the most im portant linguistic frontier, that between the Romance and Teutonic tongues, traverses Europe diagonally from the Alps, and comes down to the coast in the northern corner of France, within sight of Dover Castle. Eng land has received from the Rhine, the Elbe and the Norwegian fjords her Teutonic language and the rudiments of her free institutions, while she has taken from the Seine, and from the western Mediterranean beyond, her Chris tianity and her scholarship. Scandinavia on the one hand and Spain on the other possess a geographical separation almost as definitely secure as that of Britain, but Scandinavia is Teutonic and Spain is Romance. Britain has been cross-fertilized from both sources.