Free Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes Page B

in which a group of deformed and decidedly dodgy characters glowers from the page –are the complete opposite: irredeemable malingerers.
    The text is no more flattering. On the notorious Highland Clearances, he writes: ‘the dreamy Celt exclaims at the parting moment from the horrid land of his birth “we’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.” And why should you return, miserable and wretched man, to the dark and filthy hovel you never sought to purify?’
    Knox pulls out all the stops when it comes to the Celts of Ireland: ‘the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. The race must be forced from the soil, by fair means if possible, still they must leave.’ A few sentences later is an entreaty to genocide no less chilling in intent than in Bosnia or Rwanda:
    The Orange Club of Ireland [an extreme protestant group] is a Saxon confederation for the clearing of the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish this work.
    By the time Knox was penning his poisonous invective, in the mid-nineteenth century, science was making itself felt in all walks of life. The appeal to rational arbitration of such issues as the racial purity, or otherwise, of Celt and Saxon had obvious attractions to those with a more liberal outlook than the likes of Robert Knox. The most articulate of these, Matthew Arnold, literary critic and a prominent champion of Celtic literature, despaired of the wedge being driven between Celt and Saxon, not just by fanatics likeKnox, but by powerful and influential members of the British Establishment. Men like Lord Lyndhurst, whose description of the Irish as ‘Aliens in speech, in religion, in blood, makes the estrangement [of Celtic and Saxon] immense, incurable, fatal.’ Feeling forced to react, Matthew Arnold makes an optimistic appeal: ‘Fanciful as this notion may seem, I am inclined to think that the march of science will insist that there is no such original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly imagined.’
    But what was the basis for Matthew Arnold’s optimism? It was this. That even if many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Saxons arrived in the centuries following Hengist, they would, within a few generations, intermarry and blend with the Britons already here. This was anathema to racial purists – it just could not happen. Races were pure and indivisible. But how could this theory of racial purity overcome the all too apparent empirical fact – especially obvious as white imperial boundaries expanded into Africa, India and America – that there were no barriers to mating between ‘races’? The answer came that the offspring of such matings were weakened hybrids, incapable of sustaining themselves over more than a few generations. How this worked in practice was explained using the Spanish ‘conquest’ of South America and the interbreeding which followed. According to Knox:
    When the best blood in Spain migrated to America, they killed as many of the natives as they could. But this could not go on, labourers to till the soil being required. Thencame the admixture with the Indian blood and the Iberian blood, the produce being the mulatto.
    Even the name, Spanish for ‘little mule’, recalls the sterile hybrid of horse and donkey. Knox continues:
    as a hybrid he [the mulatto] becomes non-productive after a time, if he intermarries only with the mulatto. Thus, year by year, the Spanish blood disappears, and with it the mulatto, and the population, retrograding towards the indigenous inhabitants, returns to that Indian population, the hereditary descendants of those whom Cortes found there.
    Races, in this exposition, do not hybridize and any unnatural mixing produces only enfeebled offspring whose progeny are doomed to extinction. Though the nineteenth century was dominated by the extreme views of