the Latins, who saw emerging therefrom hosts of
warriors, bearing with them their wives, their children, and their
portable effects, determined to win a settlement amid the fertile
regions owned and improved by the Romans.

These incursions were not colonization in the sense in which Rome
understood it; they were the migrations of a people, and were as
full, as complete, and as extensive as the Israelitish invasion of
Canaan--they were more destructive of property, but less fatal to life.
These migratory hosts left a desert behind them, and they either gained
a settlement or perished. The Roman colonies preserved their connection
with the parent stem, and invoked aid when in need; but the barbarian
hosts had no home, no reserves. Other races, moving with similar intent,
settled on the land they had vacated. These brought their own social
arrangements, and it is very difficult to connect the land system
established by the aborigines with the system which, after a lapse of
some hundreds of years, was found to prevail in another tribe or nation
which had occupied the region that had been vacated.

Neither Caesar nor Tacitus gives us any idea of the habits or usages
of the people who lived north of the Belgae. They had no notion of
Scandinavia nor of Sclavonia. The Walhalla of the north, with its
terrific deities, was unknown to them; and I am disposed to think that
we shall look in vain among the customs of the Teutons for the basis
from whence came the polity established in England by the invaders of
the fifth century. The ANGLO-SAXONs came from a region north of the
Elbe, which we call Schleswig--Holstein. They were kindred to the
Norwegians and the Danes, and of the family of the sea robbers; they
were not Teutons, for the Teutons were not and are not sailors. The
Belgae colonized part of the coast--i.e., the settlers maintained a
connection with the mainland; but the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes
did not colonize, they migrated; they left no trace of their occupancy
in the lands they vacated. Each separate invasion was the settlement of
a district; each leader aspired to sovereignty, and was supreme in
his own domains; each claimed descent from Woden, and, like Romulus or
Alexander, sought affinity with the gods. Each member of the Heptarchy
was independent of, and owed no allegiance to, the other members; and
marriage or conquest united them ultimately into one kingdom.

The primary institutions were moulded by