Note 818 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

These two antagonistic influences of an island environment may be seen working simultaneously in the same people, now one, now the other being dominant; or a period of undisturbed seclusion or exclusion may suddenly be followed by one of extensive intercourse, receptivity or expansion. Recall the contrast in the early and later history of the Canaries, Azores, Malta, England, Mauritius and Hawaii, now a lonely, half-inhabited waste, now a busy mart or teeming way-station. Consider the pronounced insular mind of the globe-trotting Englishman, the deep-seated local conservatism characterizing that world-colonizing nation, at once the most provincial and cosmopolitan on earth. Emerson says with truth, "Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable."818 Hating innovation, glorifying their habitudes, always searching for a precedent to justify and countenance each forward step, they have nevertheless led the world's march of progress. Scattered by their colonial and commercial enterprises over every zone, in every clime, subjected to the widest range of modifying environments, they show in their ideals the dominant influence of the home country. The trail of the Oxford education can be followed over the Empire, east to New Zealand and west to Vancouver. Highschool students of Jamaica take Oxford examinations in botany which are based upon English plant life and ignore the Caribbean flora! School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet these are the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation, unsurpassed even by the ancient Egyptians; who, in the snow-wrapped forests of Hudson Bay, are trappers and hunters unequalled by the Indians; who, in the arid grasslands of Australia, pasture their herds like nomad shepherd or American cowboy, and in the Tropics loll like the natives, but somehow manage to do a white man's stint of work.