war into cruelty, they were tender, almost reverential in their attitude toward women. “They had no use for laws,” said Tacitus “their good customs sufficed.”

During the century following their arrival in England, they glutted the savage in them, with the sight of bleeding corpses and burning homes; nor did they escape demoralization; for they turned their arms against each other and fought for three hundred years for tribal supremacy, only to fall before a Danish, and later, a Norman conqueror. In 871, 422 years after the landing of Hengest, and 274 years after the coming of Augustine the missionary, Alfred, the greatest of the Saxon kings, ascended the throne. The intellectual condition of England at that time, may be described in his own words, “When I began to reign I cannot remember one south of Thames who could explain the service-book in English,”—which is as much as to say that there[Pg 5] was not one fairly educated man in the richest and most progressive part of the island. For more than three hundred years, the history of England is an almost continuous record of anarchy and rapine.

[Pg 5]

Such conditions favor the strong, and, like the body of soldiers which, while advancing over the smooth road, keeps its line unbroken, but when obliged to cross a muddy, ploughed field, breaks up into a straggling file, the commonwealth of ancient Germany, with its wonderful equality and community, had so changed its form under pressure of the conditions attending the conquest of the Britons, that monarchy and slavery, and the accumulation by individuals of wealth and power, had, even before the Norman invasion, become permanent features of the society. All had possessed some share of power and wealth in the early time, and it followed that the acquisition of them was little esteemed; but now these gifts, when the Normans usurped them, grew to splendor in the eyes of those from whose presence they were being ever farther and farther withdrawn. The race for money and power had begun, and though the gaps between the contestants widened, all pressed onwards: England had entered upon her progressive stage. Now, after eight hundred years, while the rich harvest is being reaped, let us look back at the sowers, in the time of its sowing.

England was, before the rise of Japan, the only island power, and to her consequent isolation may be traced many important differences between her development and that of the continental powers. Prominent among these was an early consciousness of national existence, which gave some purpose to three centuries of otherwise meaningless 

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