man conquest may be seen everywhere in that
country to-day, it is sometimes forgotten that it was the Britain of
the Celts, not the England of the English, which was held for so
many centuries as a province of Rome.

The same love of freedom that resisted the Roman invasion in the
first home of the English was no less strong in their second home,
when Alfred with his brave yeomen withstood the invading Danes at
Ashdown and Edington, and saved England from becoming a Danish
province. It is true that the Normans, by one decisive battle,
placed a French king on the throne of England, but the English
spirit of freedom was never subdued; it rose superior to the
conquerors of Hastings, and in the end English speech and English
freedom gained the mastery.

The sacred flame of freedom has burned in the hearts of the
Anglo-Saxon race through all the centuries of our history, and this
spirit of freedom is reflected in our language and in our
oratory. There never have been wanting English orators when English
liberty seemed to be imperiled; indeed, it may be said that the
highest oratory has always been coincident with the deepest
aspirations of freedom.

It is said of Pitt,--the younger, I believe,--that he was fired to
oratory by reading the speeches in Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' These
speeches--especially those of Satan, the most human of the
characters in this noble epic,--when analyzed and traced to their
source, are neither Hebrew nor Greek, but English to the core. They
are imbued with the English spirit, with the spirit of Cromwell,
with the spirit that beat down oppression at Marston Moor, and
ushered in a freer England at Naseby. In the earlier Milton of a
thousand years before, whether the work of Caedmon or of some other
English muse, the same spirit is reflected in Anglo-Saxon
words. Milton's Satan is more polished, better educated, thanks to
Oxford and Cambridge, but the spirit is essentially one with that of
the ruder poet; and this spirit, I maintain, is English.

The dry annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are occasionally lighted
up with a gleam of true eloquence, as in the description of the
battle of Brunanburh, which breaks forth into a pean of
victory. Under the year 991, there is mention of a battle at Maldon,
between the English and the Danes, in which great heroism must have
been displayed, for it inspired at the time one of the most
patriotic outbursts of song to be found in the whole range of