mies, and to unite them
to his own. He would thus gain a double advantage, strengthening himself
by an accession which weakened his foes.

His plan succeeded so far as inducing Richard himself, the Duke of
Normandy, to espouse his cause, but it did not enable Ethelred to
triumph over his enemies. They, on the contrary, conquered _him_, and,
in the end, drove him from the country altogether. He fled to Normandy
for refuge, with Emma his wife, and his two young sons. Their names were
Edward and Alfred.

Richard II., Emma's brother, who was then the Duke of Normandy, received
the unhappy fugitives with great kindness, although _he_, at least,
scarcely deserved it. It was not surprising that he was driven from his
native realm, for he possessed none of those high qualities of mind
which fit men to conquer or to govern. Like all other weak-minded
tyrants, he substituted cruelty for wisdom and energy in his attempts to
subjugate his foes. As soon as he was married to Emma, for instance,
feeling elated and strong at the great accession of power which he
imagined he had obtained by this alliance, he planned a general massacre
of the Danes, and executed it on a given day, by means of private
orders, sent secretly throughout the kingdom. Vast numbers of the Danes
were destroyed; and so great was the hatred of the two races for each
other, that they who had these bloody orders to obey executed them with
a savage cruelty that was absolutely horrible. In one instance they
buried women to the waist, and then set dogs upon them, to tear their
naked flesh until they died in agony. It would be best, in narrating
history, to suppress such horrid details as these, were it not that in
a land like this, where so much depends upon the influence of every
individual in determining whether the questions and discussions which
are from time to time arising, and are hereafter to arise, shall be
settled peacefully, or by a resort to violence and civil war, it is very
important that we should all know what civil war is, and to what
horrible atrocities it inevitably leads.

Alfred the Great, when he was contending with the Danes in England, a
century before this time, treated them, so far as he gained advantages
over them, with generosity and kindness; and this policy wholly
conquered them in the end. Ethelred, on the other hand, tried the
effect of the most tyrannical cruelty, and the effect was only to arouse
his enemies to a more determined and