One of the finest indications of regionalism in the British Isles is a good course in American history. If no American history is available, a sound grounding in the story of the British Empire should serve much the same purpose. It is surely no accident that the last work of the great British Imperial historian, Sir Reginald Coupland, was a book on Welsh and Scottish nationalism. As one studies the settlement of British peoples overseas and tries to assess the marks which they have made on their adopted countries, one becomes more and more aware of the differences which exist amongst these peoples in their country of origin.

Among the immigrant groups which made a considerable contribution to the development of the United States and of the American way of life the Cornish people must be reckoned. Older accounts of the mining, camps of the Pacific Coast actually enumerate the “Cornish nationality” among the races that thronged to the gold and silver diggings. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, British, census returns reveal that there were rarely more than a third of a million Cornish folk in the “old country”, and after 1861 their numbers declined. Yet this people impressed themselves upon the American scene, even on some of its most superficial observers, and this for a variety of reasons, apart from the local provincialisms created by geographic remoteness and physical difficulties of communication in the homeland until well into the “railway age”.

There is a story told in Wales of a certain John Jones, a stalwart of the local choir, who died and arrived up above just in time for a Heavenly Choir practice. He immediately took his place and, looking around, found that there were a thousand tenors, a thousand sopranos and a thousand contraltos but only himself in the bass. Nothing daunted, he gave of his best in the opening chorus until suddenly the Heavenly Conductor rapped on the podium and turning to John Jones, said, “Not quite ao loud in the bass, please, Mr. Jones”. It has been much the same in the field of emigration; for every John Jones who went to America, whole choirs of other nationalities flooded in, and, with a few exceptions, subsequent narrators of the story of the Welsh in America, have sung, on both sides of the Atlantic, very loudly in the bass. The quality of the Welsh contribution to the United States as against the quantity of that contribution has been bolstered by filio-pietistic writers who have claimed for the Welsh nation, Roger Williams (who was not a Welshman), many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davies, John L. Lewis and Frank Lloyd Wright among many hundreds of other “eminent Welshmen”. Possibly the high water mark of such claims has been that of the discovery of America by Prince Madoc in the twelfth century, and the legend of the Welsh-speaking Welsh Indians, which was taken up again with great zeal in the nineteenth century and has lingered on to the present day despite the researches of Thomas Stephens which have reduced the claim to that of a romantic legend.

The history of Irish emigration to America is a subject of formidable size of which even the outlines are far from firmly established. Still, as emigration studies develop it seems inevitable that the basic importance and general interest of Irish emigration will be increasingly recognized and attract the attention of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Bulletin wishes to apologise to the Editor of the Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien for an error which appeared in Bulletin 7, page 47. It was stated there that Jahrbuch 2 could have been increased a hundred times; it should have read that it was increased by a hundred pages.

When William James, at the beginning of his 1901 Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, referred to Edinburgh as “sacred to the American imagination” and went on to pay tribute to its philosophical traditions, he was indulging in something much more than the customary academic pleasantries which every visiting lecturer feels obliged to make. Sir William Hamilton's lectures, he said, “were the first philosophic writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was inmersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown.”