BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

“natural rivals” rather than friendly cousins. 75 Years before Joseph Chamberlain’s failed efforts
to promote an Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic alliance with Germany, the advocacy for imperial
federation and preparation for inevitable war with Germany had acquired a racial basis, one
derived from the pseudo-Darwinian idea of nations as “species in the making.” 76 Ford Maddox
Ford mockingly described the inevitable outcome of a future determined according to the dictates
of national character with a warning about the peril of English slackness:
We are the people who will win terrific victories against enormous odds—in the game of
tennis, or in the other game of tennis that used to be played with stone balls. But in the
end, some Prussian, some Jew, or some Radical politician will sleeplessly get the best of
us and take away the prizes of our game.” 77
75 MacDougall, Racial Myth in British History, 128-29, writes that the myth of a racial
alliance with Germany lingered on in moribund form until the outbreak of World War I.
76 [A Biologist], “A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy” Saturday Review 81
(February 1896): 118-20.
Conscious Stereotyping in the Nineteenth Century
The term “stereotype,” once strictly printers’ jargon referring to a metal plate used for
imprinting identical images, appeared occasionally in either a literary or national context during
the nineteenth century. In 1890 Gladstone referred to Irish “discontent stereotyped in the
experience of generations and of centuries” as a warning against the futility of Conservative half-
way measures on the issue of Home Rule. 78 In 1893 the writer of an article on English characters
in French fiction mentioned “the Englishman of the French stage who (except he be taken from
77 Ford Maddox Hueffer [Ford], “High Germany 1: How It Feels to Be Members of
Subject Races,” Saturday Review 112 (30 September 1911): 422. Ford’s name change represents
his growing anti-Germanism and his resignation to peer pressure. See Firchow, Death of the
German Cousin, 90-99.
78 Daily Telegraph, 23 January 1890, 5.
137