BRITISH ENTERPRISE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 49, Issue 68, 31 December 1928, Page 7

BRITISH ENTERPRISE.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD AT LARGE. Sir Michael Sadler in his inaugural address at the summer school for American teachers and graduates, held at Oxford, the subject being "England in the Nineteenth Century," made an interesting calculation of the proportions contributed by Scots, Welshmen, Irishmen, and Englishmen to British enterprise. "It occurred to me," he said, to take four columns of the index to Dr. Clapham's 'Economic History of .Modern Britain,' and to find the nationality of men and women whose names were mentioned. The columns I chose at random, except that I felt it fair that one of them should consist of names beginning with 'M' and another of names beginning with 'o.' The result was that.l got the following totals; of names arranged under the head of the race:—Welsh, 3; Irish, 7; Scot- 1 tish, 12; English, 21. Curiosity led, me to repeat the experiment, under the same conditions, on the index of Mr A. V. Dicey's 'Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century.' The result was ; —Welsh, 1; Irish, 1; Scottish, 11; English-, 20. "To check these tests I turned to Monsieur Eli Halevy's 'History of the English People, 1820-1841.' The poll stood as follows:—Welsh, 1; Irish, 4; Scottish, 11; English, 27. Finally, I made the same calculation from the index to Mr G. M. Trevelyan's 'British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782-1901,' and got the following result:—Welsh, 0; Irish, 10; Scottish, 9; English, 24. Thus out of 167 names eminent enough to be mentionel by lour different writers in these 16 pages of index (six of the names, I think, ocurred in more than one list, but their nationalities were fairly distributed), five were Welsh, 22 Irish, 43 Scottish, and 97 English. "Finally, as a control of this result, I took 16 columns of the index of Sir William Molesworth's 'History of England from 1830-1874,' and from 160 names got similar totals:—Five were Welsh, 2S Irish, 31 Scottish, and 92 English. I need not labour the conclusions to which these figures point Many national talents have enriched what Ave sometimes unguardedly call English policy and English achievement. You cannot distinguish England in the nineteenth century from Britain in the-nineteenth century. With the English gifts have been blended the characteristics of the Scotch, the Irish, and the Welsh. Another point worth notice is that, when we take relative populations in account, Wales about holds her own in eminence. She has roughly one-seven-teenth of the population of England and about the -same proportion of names significant in our history during the nineteenth century. Ireland, which roughly has a population equal to oneeighth of that of England, comes out in one of my lists with" her due share of eminence and in the other list with a much larger proportion. But Scotland, the population of which is roughly one-eighth of that of England, does even better. Arithmetically, in proportion to population, we should have expected her to produce about 20 eminent names in each of my lists. Actually, she gets 31 in one listand 43 in the other. There is no mistaking the significance of the Irish and Scottish contribution to the energy and distinction of British enterprise and culture during the nineteenth century."