cess. Indeed, they were much better equipped for longdistance sailing than the vessels of Columbus. It is well known that the Norse discoverers of America conferred the name of Mikla Irlant, or Great Ireland, on a region not far distant from one of the coasts where they settled. The territory which has Cape Race for its apex, and which includes Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island, occupies the precise latitude of the Island of Brazil in many of the ancient maps. The name Brazil was given to the South American country now so called in almost a haphazard manner, and in the vague belief that the legendary locality of that name had been rediscovered after the lapse of centuries.

But Wales has also a claim to traditional honours in the discovery and even in the settlement of America, which, should she care to take it seriously, is at least as strong as that of Ireland. On the death of Owen Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, in 1170 A.D., tradition says that his sons became embroiled in civil strife, and one of them, Madoc, a man experienced in seamanship, disgusted with the unstable condition of the country, resolved to lead a colony to those Western lands of which he had heard his seafaring acquaintances speak. Accordingly he collected several hundreds of his followers, steered westwards, and eventually established a colony 'in a fertile land.' Leaving here a hundred and twenty persons, he returned to Wales, and fitted out a larger expedition of ten ships, with which he once more put to sea, this time passing out of human ken.

The evidence in support of this story is that it is mentioned in early Welsh annals, and that numerous travellers have discovered traces of the Welsh tongue among the lighter coloured tribes of American Indians. Meredith, a Welsh bard, seems to have celebrated the voyage in some verses composed, according to Hakluyt, in 1477, or fifteen years before the Columbian discovery, but the original printed source of the legend is Humphrey Lloyd's History of Cambria, now called Wales,' which was published at London in 1584. But the Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld' of Montanus, published at Amsterdam in 1671, made the story more universally familiar. It necessarily entered into the discussions of the learned men who in the 17th century were busying themselves

la with the question of the origin of the American races, I and among these De Laet and Hornius gave credit to its reality.

The linguistic evidences of Madoc's settlements in the New World, however, were not brought into prominence until after one, Morgan Jones, a Welsh missionary, had fallen among the Tuscarora Indians in 1660, and found, as he asserted, that they could understand his Welsh. He is most explicit regarding the ability of his Indian captors to speak the purest Welsh, and states that they perfectly understood those passages of Scripture which he read to them from his Welsh Bible. It is impossible to enumerate the extraordinary stream of books and papers dealing with this fascinating question which saw the light towards the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. The renewed interest in the subject seems to have prompted Southey to the composition of his poem 'Madoc.' Meanwhile persistent reports were published of the discovery of tribes of Indians who spoke Welsh. Some years later the publication of Catlin's 'American Indians' probably gave more conviction than had previously been felt as regards the actuality of the tradition because of his statements of positive linguistic correspondences in the language of the so-called white Mandans of the Missouri, the similarity of their boats to the old Welsh coracles, and other parallels of custom. The discovery, too, that there was actually a tribe of Indians in Oregon calling themselves Modocs, seemed to many to clinch the matter. 'It seems hardly necessary to state,' writes Mr James Mooney of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, that there is not a provable trace of Welsh, Gaelic, or any other European language in any native American language excepting for a few words of recent introduction.' But it is noticeable that nowhere in the publications of the Bureau are definite facts adduced for the final discomfiture of this extraordinarily vital and persistent tradition.

The anthropological evidence and the very considerable mass of tradition which has accumulated around the question of the origin of the American race seem to unite in affording proof that the New World, so far from having been populated by any one race any given period, received its human stock from Asia, Vol. 244.-No. 484.

Y

or at

Polynesia, and even from Europe, at intervals widely removed. Probably, also, there were many immigrations from these several sources in the course of ages. It seems, however, reasonable to infer that the most numerous contribution came from Northern Asia at a period when the eastern portions of that continent had developed only a slender degree of culture. Polynesian influence must naturally have been of a more slight and intermittent character, and if European (other than early Norse) immigrants entered America, it must have been during some phase when communication by land or short sea passage was possible. It may yet be proved that Magdalenian men of the Upper Old Stone Age actually did drift or wander to America from the shores of Europe. But if they did, they assuredly did not leave many of their bodily remains in the Western continent, and, so far as is at present known, none of the works of their hands.

Evidence in support of the gradual development of the American race in complete isolation is adduced by many well-equipped scholars, who point to the distinctive character of American agriculture, with its cultivation of plants peculiar to the soil-tobacco, maize, manioc, and others to the absence of draught and milk-giving animals, to the fact that the wheel and other mechanical devices were unknown in America, in support of their theory. But to maintain a thesis so confined in the face of well-founded proofs for the penetration of America by alien influences seems as unscientific as to adopt the opposite view and to refer the origin of American culture in its entirety to a handful of castaways. Moderately employed, both theories are capable of acceptance, but it is impossible to entertain either, when pushed to extremes, with seriousness. This is as much as to say that America, although it underwent no intentional or specific colonisation in pre-Columbian times by races or adventurers equipped for settlement, was, as all the evidence seems to show, reached by bands or units of seafarers carried thither by the everready agency of the trade winds, who brought with them the knowledge, and perhaps the artifacts, of a distant and alien culture, which only partially affected and modified that of the older settlers from NorthEastern Asia. LEWIS SPENCE.

Art. 7.-SELF-DETERMINATION.

THE expression 'Self-Determination' has recently acquired a technical meaning in the realm of international affairs. In this connexion it now stands for the determination of the political allegiance which a population is to pay by the free choice of the population concerned. In more concrete terms, it implies that a population is itself the arbiter whether it shall constitute a separate sovereign and independent state or an autonomous community within a larger unit, and in the latter case what the degree of autonomy shall be; or, again, whether it shall merge itself in a larger unit without retaining any vestige of separate corporate existence. Examples of Self-Determination, in this political sense, can be found in some of the most celebrated events in Western history. It was an act of Self-Determination in each case that founded the modern kingdoms of Italy, Greece, and Serbia, the American Union, the Dutch Republic, the original nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, and the mediæval Italian communes. The various populations of modern Italy exercised self-determination in breaking away from the Temporal Power of the Papacy, from the Hapsburg and Bourbon Dynasties, and from a number of other sovereignties in order to merge themselves in a new unitary national state; the populations of the British Colonies in North America exercised it in breaking away from Great Britain in order to form a new federal state; the populations of the medieval Italian cities exercised it in extorting from the Holy Roman Empire a far-reaching autonomy; and, mutatis mutandis, the action taken in the other cases cited was similar in kind. From these examples it is evident that the act of Self-Determination may possess a quality, whether inherent or accidental, which secures our immediate sympathy and approval. Indeed, the examples cited are all landmarks in the history of political freedom. Yet to say that the exercise of Self-Determination by certain populations on certain occasions has been a good thing does not necessarily imply that an absolute right to Self-Determination exists which is always morally valid and practically expedient. It does not even imply that

Self-Determination is the element in those particular historical events which excites our admiration. We may find that what we admire is Self-Determination exercised under particular conditions, or even that it is these concomitants of Self-Determination rather than Self-Determination itself in the abstract. It may be interesting to follow up this line of inquiry; but, in order to do so, we must first examine further the usage of our term, which, in the political field, is very much more recent than the occurrences of the fact which have just been given as illustrations of it.

As now applied to politics, the expression 'SelfDetermination' appears to be a metaphor borrowed from the language of metaphysical speculation. The phrase was not originally coined to denote an act, or a right of action, performed by a population, that is, performed corporately by a number of individuals. It seems to have arisen first as a philosophical term to denote a supposed characteristic of a rational human personality as contrasted with other forms of being. Whereas the wind in reality blows not where it lists but where physical laws direct it, the spirit of man (according to some schools of philosophy) is not determined by external laws but is a law unto itself, or contains a law within itself. This, crudely stated, seems to be the metaphysical doctrine of Self-Determination, and in this place it would be irrelevant to enter further into the deep philosophical questions involved. It is sufficient for our purpose to point out that, in this primary philosophical setting, the term is quite free from those ambiguities which beset it in its secondary political application. In the first place, in the philosophical usage there is no question of a right to SelfDetermination, but only of a fact (whether real or imaginary). The philosopher does not ask whether a personality ought to be self-determining, any more than an anthropologist asks whether a man ought to be brachycephalic or dolichocephalic. He simply investigates whether in fact personalities are self-determining or not. In the second place, there is no uncertainty, on the philosophical plane, as to the subject of which the supposed fact of Self-Determination is predicated. A personality is something of which we have immediate