bloodshed.

As the insulation of England was the most striking among the favorable circumstances, so love of independence became the distinguishing feature of the English character, belonging alike to the Saxon of the time of Tacitus and the Englishman of to-day. The effect of this instinct has been to invigorate all of the members of the society; and to it is due the succession of glorious victories won by the English yeomanry over the French army at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt; the ranks of the English army being so far superior, individually, to the ranks of the French, that superiority in the numbers of the French was unavailing.

But, on the other hand, it was the same spirit which caused the Saxon freeman to stay away from the tribal assembly for several days, in order to show that he acknowledged no duty to obey: and this spirit, again which spent the English by more than three hundred years of domestic wars and left them helpless before sixty thousand Norman and French invaders.

The very different period of peace and prosperity, which followed upon Norman tyranny, taught the English to distinguish between a just and an exaggerated sense of the freedom to which each individual was entitled, and in Burke’s attitude towards the French revolution, we have the residuum of the struggle between Saxon independence and Norman discipline.

The church of England also expresses the English spirit of liberty. It stands not for dissent, but for national self-control; it is an independent, not a protestant church. To realize this, we must remember, that the desire for separation from the church of Rome showed itself in the eleventh century; and from then on continuously, until Henry VIII slit the thin thread which bound England to Rome, the cause of ecclesiastical and of civil liberty advanced side by side.

It is a noteworthy characteristic of the Saxon, as described by implication in the Germania of Tacitus, that, while he barely tolerated a king, he cheerfully obeyed a captain, or war leader. When, therefore, Angles and Saxons entered upon a period of conquest in England, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, it became quite easy for the captain, imperceptibly, and, to a certain extent involuntarily, to add to his proper office that of law giver and administrator. In this way, especially after the exchange of Saxon for Norman administrators, the still rebellious Saxon freeman became hopelessly entangled in a network of machinery, local and[Pg 6] national, which kept him for many years an obedient, unresisting subject.

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