ty of their lives. Lovers of freedom, they were loyal followers
of their leaders in battle: accustomed by the severity of their winters
to the greatest hardships, and hardened by lives of 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 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.

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withdrawn.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, be