The alphabetical series of Norman or Anglo-Norman names here given was selected by an English scholar from an English official directory and published, anonymously, in the latter half of the last century, to illustrate a theory of the genesis of the English race. The present selection represents only in part the series or lists originally published, embracing several thousand names. To this selection the writer has added Norman or Scandinavian names from other sources, together with "notes" that serve to confirm in detail the general theory of inherited racial traits. The list which he first published has been greatly enlarged and many additions made from the original English series.[7]

Mr. Freeman says that the Normans "lost themselves" among the people whom they conquered. Very clearly, however, the "names" were not lost. The original Norman may be said to have had, in a high degree, that personnalitÉ absorbante which, according to LittrÉ, is characteristic of every great man. It is not remarkable, therefore, that after every Norman invasion the resulting ethnical transmutation was complete. The new element became at once the vitalizing power of the "absorptive" or subjugated race. This gift of racial transformation was so great that the Scandinavians, seizing a Gallic province, became French or Norman; subjugating England, they became English; overflowing Ireland, they fused at once with the native race; actually becoming "Irisher than the Irish" themselves—Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores. The Duke of Argyle once said in the English House of Lords that three of the Irish leaders of that day (one of them John Redmond, the present Irish King) were genealogically superior men—men of illustrious descent—leaders of royal or noble Norman blood; confirming the declaration made by the author of the "Peerage" that it is not lands but ancestors that make a nobility. The career of the Norman as a conquering or migratory race has been a perpetual masquerade; in England taking the form of an Irishman and controlling the Parliament; in the same guise leading the armies of England and France; in America, demoniacally possessed, becoming the personal director of a lynching, the boss of a strike, or the leader of a lawless expeditionary force. But everywhere he leads! The name of the race disappears, but the original, indestructible, irresistible, invisible and protean force is still there. If we reject the existence and operation of this subtle and pervasive influence in the ancestral strains of Kentucky, the evolution of the typical Kentuckian can not easily be explained. The race is "lost," not because the visiting Norman is absorbed by his host, but because the visitor appropriates all that his host may have, even his personality and all that it implies. The Englishman, or the Irishman, or the Scotchman, disappear, and a transmogrified Norman takes his place. It is not English, nor Irish, nor French absorptiveness, but Norman appropriativeness, that has done the work. Precisely thus, to compare great things with small: the English Whigs once went in swimming, and the Norman Tories "stole their clothes." But the Norman's act of appropriation usually goes deeper than the skin. He is not content with a petty theft of "clothes." With an almost satanic subtlety and finesse he appropriates the very soul. It becomes, indeed, his very own. That incomparable illusionist, Benjamin Disraeli, was a past-master in these Norman arts, and in perfect sympathy with those Anglo-Norman Tories who followed his fortunes in victory or defeat. But Norman or Saxon were equally indifferent to him. It was glory enough for Semitic ambition to build success upon the needs of both; and yet, in doing it, this man of alien blood and ancient race repeated the miracle of Lanfranc—the scholar and statesman who, in the old Norman days, had not only cooled the hot blood of the Normanized Scandinavian and conciliated the respect of the proud, implacable Saxon, but, linking their interests in inseparable association, had brightened with a prospect of imperial splendor the destinies of the common race. So, too, the Semitic statesman charmed the rudest elements with his Orphean song. His brilliant successor, Salisbury, added to parts and learning the technical information of a savant. Disraeli had something better. He had that deep, philosophic insight which seems to be bred into the elect of an ancient stock. It is a mystical gift.

This (if we may believe Haeckel) was the "inspiration" of the Jewish Law-giver.

How little escaped the thoughtful eyes of our Semitic statesman, as he surveyed from his coign of vantage the shifting currents of our modern world! In depicting Monsignore Berwick, a descendant of an old Scottish family that for generations had mingled Italian blood with its own, the writer looks quite beyond the native environment, and sees only the old Northern blood in the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the young Italian priest. Describing a nineteenth century function at the beautiful English home of Hugo Bohun, he sees at once in Mr. Gaston Phoebus—the most gifted and attractive of the swells whom fashion has herded in this social jungle of Bohun—not a modern Englishman, but a Gascon noble of the Sixteenth Century, clothed with all the attractions of a contemporary courtier of France—the France of Louis le Grand. In "Gaston Phoebus"—says the philosophic statesman—"Nature, as is sometimes her wont, had chosen to reproduce exactly the original type." When the subtle Semitic thinker introduced an American "Colonel" at the swell function of Hugo Bohun, why should he take him from the South, and give him a Norman name? Had nature reproduced in Colonel Campian the antique Norman type?

It is a notorious fact, says Herbert Spencer, that the Celtic type disappears altogether in the United States.

Doubtless some vague conception of a potential undercurrent of ancestral blood must have been passing through the mind of that fine old gentleman, Mr. Isaac Shelby of Fayette, when dispensing his stores of bachelor wisdom to his young friends just "after the war." He would say, "Depend on it, young gentlemen, there is no cross like a Virginian cross." The differentiating quality was there. It was observed, but not accurately depicted perhaps, by Disraeli, by Barrett Wendell, and by Isaac le Bon. What was it? If a racial quality, what race? Two of these acute observers were of Scandinavian stock. The other did not need to say, even to the proudest statesman at Potsdam or St. James, "Your race is of but yesterday compared with my own." One of Disraeli's favorite themes was race. Indeed, a statesman could not be ignorant of the subject in his day. The claims of race were sweeping over diplomatic arrangements and dynastic rights. Bismarck was unifying the German people by removing ancient landmarks, by "appropriating" autonomous territories, and by appropriating or absorbing a large population of the Scandinavian race; and the third (and last) Napoleon undertook to unify the Latin races by placing an Austrian prince upon the Mexican throne. But the Napoleonic prince pushed his reconstructive theories of race to a destructive conclusion when, in freeing Italy, he furnished a formidable partner to the Triple Alliance, that ultimately destroyed France. The sentiment of race, properly directed, has its uses. But the director must not be a despot or a despot's agent. The feeling must be popular in origin and expression—voluntary, spontaneous, normal, autonomous. There was never a better illustration of its power than in the prolonged struggle of Kentucky for existence as an American State. There was never a better illustration of popular capacity in statecraft and of enterprise in war than in the early years of the last century (1800-12). They—the people—discharged the functions of an independent State. Kentucky was in fact a little nation. Raising and equipping armies, receiving diplomatic emissaries or agents, defending her frontiers, guarding the Atlantic border, protecting the territories of the Northwest, and in conjunction with the "sea-power" of Commodore Perry actually conducting war upon foreign soil. The very guns on Perry's ships were "sighted" by riflemen from Kentucky; and when the day came to try conclusions with the bold Englishman on his own soil, one of the most efficient aides upon Shelby's staff was Perry himself. Is there nothing in this record to appeal to a sentiment of national pride in the Kentuckian's heart? And does it not inspire a disposition to revive and invigorate those pristine instincts of our common race? Probably the recent manifestation of "home-coming" sentiment was denotive of some such stirring of racial impulse and emotion long dormant in the soul.