The Pennsylvania Germans
have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as
the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history
knows, from the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British
stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently,
however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not
record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or
Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of
a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are "the
prize liars of the universe." He was an expert accountant by
profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three
Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh
themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively
imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their
language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression
of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for
pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was
perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though
he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests,
there were things that had never appealed to him.
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