Dean is quite correct in his observations of the English who may not have wanted to get their hands dirty compared to the Scots on his ancestor's plantation. He was also correct in saying that we should be careful not to generalise. With this in mind we should remember that the attitude to labour or getting one's hands dirty was based on Class not Nationality/Etnicity, both on what class one belonged to, or, aspired to belong to. We should remember the hundreds and thousands upon thousands of English labourers who went to the Colonies in the early and later years; the millions left back in England; all of whom tilled the fields, dug the ditches and canals, worked in the mines, on ships and in the Army and Navy. We should remember also the millions of people driven off the fields, or out of their cottages, with the Enclosure Acts, and into the factories of the developing Industrial revolution. It was a time when it was said that "sheep ate men," as the land was used to pasture sheep. As a result people were deprived of accustomed means of subsistence, out of work, and starved and ended up in the Parish work-houses; or were jailed for vagrancy and transported to the colonies as bonded labour for petty theft, as they tried to feed themselves and family. All the while from feudal to Victorian times, thousands laboured away in "service" in the houses and on Estates of the Gentry and Aristocracy. We should also not forget the Gentry and Aristocratic family members who were "transported" because of their Catholicism, or suspicions of wanting to restore it to England. They were made bonded servants and slaves in the colonies. We should also not forget the brutalisation of the English sailor and soldier. We all may know of the whipping that was meted out to them, there is a case one soldier being given 4,000 lashes in one year and lived. There was also the press-ganging of people to work on the ships, kidnapped like slaves and worked like slaves. Again there is the English in the army engineering companies that built fortifications, bridges, pontoons etc. and marched about in the American swamps chasing after the American "rebels." We should not forget the executions, the hangings, the breaking on the rack, the drawing and quartering of rebels and mutineers in the army, navy, or in the many rebellions in England. We should also remember that the enslavement to wage labour in England went side by side with the institution of slavery in the colonies. While the Africans were being brutalised in the fields and factories of the sugar plantations, the English labourer was being brutalised in the factories and mines and rolling mills. Entire families of men women and small children would also be forced to work in atrocious conditions and prolonged hours of work. Children would have their limbs amputed because of accidents with the machines. There is one story of a little girl with long hair, whose job was to clear the lint being built up between the rapidly spinning rollers. She got her hair caught, pulled in, and she was wrapped around the rollers, almost as thinned-out like the cloth the factory was making. It was also side by side with the amelioration of slavery (from 1823 and after) that the amelioration of working conditions came about in England. This led to the limiting the hours of work and the work week; limiting work to cerrtain age groups; the right to form Unions etc, but not before workers were shot in the streets for "rioting". Workers continued to live in cramped and poorly ventilated "housing". Lots of money being made by slum lords, from the over-crowding. The land-lords who even disputed their tenants ownership of their "night-soil", which the land-lords allowed to accumulate near the houses for sale to farmers as fertiliser. In this period also there was some improvement of the environmental conditions that caused cholera epidemics, (the water supply was separated from contamination from sewage). Remedies in relation to water supply, and sanitation was made in the reign of William IV, (1830-1837). Education also expanded putting children into public schools et! c. Housing was looked at and better ones developed later. Meanwhile, women continued to be legal chattels of their husbands and fathers. There is even one story from as late as the 1840's of a farmer hanging a sign with "For sale sign - 10 shillings" around the neck of his wife. Some-one actually took him up on the offer! Meanwhile all the dirty work like the ones mentioned above still had to get done, and other really dirty work, like clearing "night-soil" and chimney-sweeping. So we should always remember when we think or speak or write of ethnicity or nationality to think in terms of Class.