the Italians, that the House of Hohenzollern has
triumphed over the House of Hapsburg, that President Johnson rules at
Washington, and that Queen Victoria sits in the seat of Akbar or
Aurungzebe, are facts which must all be attributed to the decision made
by the sword at Hastings, no matter what may have been the particular
process of events after that battle. It is possible that the misery
consequent on the victory of the Normans has been exaggerated, though a
great deal of suffering must have followed from it. But there can be no
exaggeration of the general consequence of the success of the Normans.
That determined the future course of the world, and will continue to
determine it long after the Valley of the Amazon shall be far more
thickly inhabited, and better known, than to-day is the Valley of the
Danube.

There is one popular error with regard to the Norman Conquest which it
may not be amiss to correct. It is taken for granted by most persons who
have written on it, that the triumph of William was the triumph of an
aristocracy over a people, and we often hear the Saxons spoken of as
democrats who were subdued by aristocrats. This is an entirely erroneous
view of the whole subject. So far as there was a contest at Hastings
between aristocrats and democrats, the Normans were champions of
democracy, and the Saxons of the opposite principle. The Saxon
aristocracy was very powerful, and its power was steadily increasing for
generations before the Conquest; and had there not been a foreign
invasion, it is altogether probable that the English system soon would
have become strictly oligarchical. One of the chief causes of Harold's
failure was his inability to command the prompt support of some of the
greatest nobles, as Earls Edwin and Morcar, who paid bitterly for their
backwardness in after days. Something of this may be attributed to the
weakness of his title to the crown, but the mere fact that such men
could so powerfully influence events at a time when the very existence
of the country was at stake, is enough to show how strong were the
insular aristocrats; and it was this selfish aristocracy that was
destroyed by the Normans, most of whom were upstarts, the very scum of
Europe having entered William's army. We doubt if ever there was a
greater triumph effected by the poor and the lowly-born over the rich
and the well-born, than that which was gained at Hastings, though it
required some years to make it complete. "