lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they
were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life,
administrative order, still remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the
past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with
the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities.
Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land
remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The
Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of
priest and lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the coins which we dig
up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a world
which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its
manners, its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of the
completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than the religious
change which passed over the land. Alone among the German assailants of
Rome the English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to
overthrow. The new England was a heathen country. Homestead and boundary,
the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced
Christ.

As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us
the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a
conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse
to the land over which it passed. But if the new England which sprang
from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the
arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away,
it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had
been destroyed. The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout
the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by
tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting
for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the
material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was
impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home
of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked
the site of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the Engl