ilanthropists, but we trust it to
men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves
poor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introduced
representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a
semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own
institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand
men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act or
faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of
Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its
monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and
enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century,
there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all
their work was in vain.

That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved
another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything
away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first
barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark
and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded
by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual
central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a
clock. It was really a race between the driving energy of the
missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of
the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped
before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization
which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished
unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed
like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the
crown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and
towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The
story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair
and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats
alternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats.
It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown,
that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary
part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the
tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king's younger
brother. There is, from the first, something humble