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FOUR OXFORD LECTURES 
 
 1887' 
 
 FIFTY YEARS OF EUEOPEAN HISTORY 
 TEUTONIC CONQUEST IN GAUL AND BRITAIN 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD A. FREEMAN, M.A., Hon. D.C.L. & LL.D. 
 
 REGIUS PEOFESSOE OP MODEEN HISTOET 
 
 PELLOW OP OEIEL COLLEGE 
 
 HONOEAEY PELLOW OF TEINITY COLLEGE 
 
 OF THE ' 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 f0ntr0n 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1888^ 
 
 [All rights reserved ] 
 

 10441s 
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 SPRECKELS 
 
PREPACE. 
 
 Or these four lectures, suggested by recent events, the 
 first two stand quite independent of any of the courses, 
 past and present, spoken of in the preface to my " Chief 
 Periods of European History." They simply set forth 
 the thoughts suggested by the Jubilee year from an 
 historical point of view. The latter part of the second 
 lecture has been somewhat expanded, but only expanded, 
 since its reading in the schools. It was impossible to 
 get all the matter into the time allowed for a single 
 lecture. The second pair of lectures, I may say, have 
 been forced upon me by late discussions. I should have 
 been much better pleased to say nothing more about 
 Teutonic Conquest in Britain till I had reached the subject 
 by the path which I had chalked out. But there has been 
 so much controversy on the matter, I find myself so con- 
 stantly taken to be the representative of doctrines which 
 neither I nor, as far as I know, anybody else ever main- 
 tained, that I was in a manner driven both to speak and 
 to publish. I hope that these two lectures may be taken 
 as a kind of summary beforehand of what I hope to do for 
 the whole subject, if life and strength are spared me. 
 
 Oxford, February loth, 1888. 
 
 104475 
 
FIFTY YEAES OF EUROPEAN HISTOEY. 
 
 TWO LECTURES. 
 
r OK THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 (November 3, 1887.) 
 
 The immediate Jubilee fever may be supposed by this 
 time to have passed away; but it may not be useless 
 to take advantage of a point of time which has caused 
 so many to look back, in order to call up some memories 
 of the state of things half a century ago. The point to 
 which we must look back for such a purpose, and the 
 point from which we must look back, may both seem 
 to be purely arbitrary. The fifty years between 1837 
 and 1887 have been marked by some of the most memor- 
 able events in European history; they truly show that 
 our own time is as well worthy of the heed of the historical 
 student as any time that ever went before it. But the 
 period of fifty years, as a period, is not clearly marked 
 off*, either at its beginning or at its end, by any of the 
 great turning-points of history. We cannot say that the 
 year 1837 was one of the marked historic years of all 
 time or of our own time. Points a few years before and 
 a few years later have far greater claim to reckon among 
 the epoch-making years. The year 1830 was a memorable 
 year; we might say that 1848 was a yet more memorable 
 year, were it not that 1848 is so clearly a second step in 
 a career in which 1830 was the first step. The events 
 of 1830 were by no means the first revolt against the 
 arrangements of 1814-5; but they were the first great 
 and successful revolt, the first assertion on a great scale 
 of the doctrine that it is not for certain sovereigns or 
 diplomatists to meet together and settle the destinies of 
 nations, but that it was for the nations to settle their 
 
 B 1 
 
4 FIFTY YFARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 destinies for themselves. The events of 1848 were the 
 fresh assertion of this doctrine on a still greater scale ; they 
 were the strivings — strivings for the most pai-t stifled and 
 blighted at the time, but destined to bear fruit in season 
 — after the results which were won in 1859 and i860, in 
 1866 and 1871. We cannot say that the year 1837 is 
 marked by any events on at all the same scale as the 
 events either of seven years before or of eleven years 
 after. Yet things are recorded in its annals which look 
 both backward and forward. To refresh my memory as 
 to its story, I looked to the well-known book called 
 Annals of our Time. It takes in only the latter half of 
 the year, the months that followed Her Majesty's accession. 
 That is, it starts from the date from which our fifty 
 years must be held to begin. That second half-year of 1837 
 was a stirring time in Canada, a time not only stirring 
 but specially instructive. It was a stirring time on the 
 Afghan border, a border to which the parochial European 
 mind is less kindly di-awn than it is to the fates of the 
 younger France and the younger England in the West. 
 Africa too has its contribution ; the wars of France in 
 Algeria were going on. But on the continent of Europe 
 little was recorded, beyond one event, not of the first scale 
 in point of magnitude, but whose significance, as we look 
 either backwards or forwards, is not small. For the entry 
 runs thus ; " November ist. Decree of the King of Hanover, 
 annulling the constitution of 1833.' 
 
 That entry, and yet more another which follows it in the 
 next month, is of special interest to professors who venture 
 to open their mouths on current affairs. How many of us here 
 are ready, if need be, to share the confessor ship of Ewald, 
 Dahlmann, Gervinus, and the brothers Grimm ? But over 
 these smaller personal questions we must not tarry. Still 
 the fact that there was, exactly fifty years back, a separate 
 King of Hanover to grant or to annul constitutions, though 
 not one of the facts which stir the general heart of the 
 world, is a fact which is well worth our looking at. It is 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. b 
 
 still more worth looking at when we remember that, within 
 thirty years from 1837, the line of Electors" and Kings of 
 Hanover, not a very long succession, ceased to be. The 
 end of the Hanoverian kingdom was, when it came, part 
 of a memorable change indeed. And for us the most 
 memorable thing about the end of that kingdom was the 
 fact that it took place without leading to any warlike or 
 diplomatic action on the pai-t of the government of Great 
 Britain, without any popular emotion on the part of the 
 people of Great Britain. The days had passed in 1866, 
 they had passed in 1837, when a British minister could 
 tell a British parliament that Hanover ought to be as dear 
 to us as Hampshii-e. In this way we do get round to a side 
 which after all gives to the beginning of cur period some- 
 what of an epoch-making character. It marks the separa- 
 tion, the final separation as far as events have yet gone, 
 between insular and continental sovereignty. It should 
 not be forgotten that our last William did in one point 
 keep on the traditions of the first. As the first William 
 in England was second in Normandy, so the last, fifth in 
 the insular Normandy, fourth in England, third in Scotland^ 
 unluckily only second in Ireland, was also fii'st in the 
 continental dominions of his own house. Each alike of our 
 four W^illiams held a dominion oi* a position on the main- 
 land, each of them had something to do with the mainland 
 which went beyond the mere holding of continental posts 
 like Dunkirk, Tangier, or Gibraltar, or of distant islands, 
 like Minorca, Malta, and Cyprus. And, during the long 
 ages between the first William and the fourth, most of 
 the sovereigns of England had held some dominion on the 
 mainland, be it all Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, or 
 only the shrunk-up dominion of Calais and Guines. And 
 be it remembered again that this last possession of England 
 on the mainland was the only one since the Normandy of 
 Henry the First which could be called a foreign conquest 
 won by English arms. William of Normandy came on 
 his own errand ; Henry of Anjou, William of Orange, and 
 
6 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 George of Hanover, came on what we may fairly call the 
 errand of England. They were foreign princes whom 
 England welcomed, but who kept their foreign dominions. 
 Nor must it be forgotten that in the time when Aquitaine 
 had ceased to have, and when Hanover had not begun to 
 have, a common ruler with England, several kings of 
 England held another kingdom within their own island 
 which was as much a separate dominion as Aquitaine or 
 Hanover. International lawyers draw curious distinctions 
 between the position of the man of Aquitaine in one age, the 
 man of Scotland in another, and the man of Hanover in a 
 third. And truly the great facts of geography and language 
 did enforce a wide distinction between Scotland and either 
 Aquitaine or Hanover, while the course of events caused 
 Aquitaine, like the insular Normandy, to be looked on as 
 a dependency of England, a position to which Hanover 
 never fell. Still in all three cases the sovereign of England 
 was sovereign of another land besides England ; he was not 
 merely sovereign of lands which he held as dependencies of 
 England, but of lands which he held by a title wholly dis- 
 tinct from that by which he held the English crown. 
 
 It is clear at first sight that this state of things has 
 passed away. The Queen of Great Britain reigns in every 
 quarter of the globe, but, whether in her Norman duchy 
 or in her Indian empire, it is as Queen of Great Britain 
 that she reigns. And our present Queen is the first of 
 her own house, she is not far from being the &st of all 
 our sovereigns of any house, of whom this could be said. 
 And it is strange how much queens, as opposed to kings, 
 have had to do with the matter. It is literally true that 
 Elizabeth and Victoria are the only sovereigns since Harold, 
 son of God wine who never held any dominion other than 
 that which came to them by virtue of the crown received 
 at Westminster. And, as Elizabeth, strangely enough, bore 
 the title of Queen of France, we may say that Victoria 
 is the first sovereign of England who has not even claimed 
 any such dominion. We may further add that it was 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 7 
 
 under Mary that the last relics of Edward the Third's 
 French kingdom passed away, that it was under Anne 
 that the other kingdom within the isle of Britain lost all 
 traces of foreign character. Victoria alone has mounted 
 the throne of the British Islands free from all possessions, 
 from all claims and titles, beside those of her British 
 kingdom and its dependencies. We see then that, after 
 all, the year 1837 is a memorable year, as marking an 
 epoch in the formal relations of the British crown. Our 
 present sovereign mounted her throne as a strictly insular 
 sovereign, insular in a sense in which few of her prede- 
 cessors had been for eight hundred years, in which none 
 had been since the last queen who reigned before her. 
 This is something in the marking of time ; yet it makes 
 the year practically memorable only in a kind of negative 
 way. The most notable thing about this change in the 
 position of the British sovereigns was how little it struck 
 men's minds that it was a change. The sepai-ation between 
 Great Britain and Hanover came, without doubt or dispute, 
 as a matter of course, by the ordinary working of the laws 
 of the two countries. It was as peaceful as the like 
 separation of lesser dignities, as when of two peerages held 
 by a single peer, the older barony of North passed to the 
 heir female and the younger earldom of Guilford to the 
 heir male. It took place without calling forth any strong 
 general feeling, save indeed a strong feeling of thankfulness 
 that the laws of Great Britain did not give the crown 
 of Great Britain to the sovereign of Hanover. A few 
 perhaps were unwise enough to regret that the laws of 
 Hanover did not give the crown of Hanover to the 
 sovereign of Great Britain. But the event was not felt 
 as the loss of Normandy, the loss of Aquitaine, or the loss 
 of Calais was felt. The name of Hanover will assuredly 
 not be found written on the heart either of British 
 sovereign or of British subject. 
 
 But the negative importance of this separation of the 
 island sovereign from all dominion on the European main- 
 
8 FIFTY YFARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY, [Lect. 
 
 land becomes tenfold when Ave think of what might have 
 been but was not. What if the sovereign of Great Britain 
 had also been sovereign of Hanover in the year when the 
 kingdom of Hanover ceased to be? In that case events 
 could hardly have taken exactly the course which they did 
 take. We may be sure that the policy of Victoria the First 
 would not have been exactly the same as the policy of George 
 the Fifth. But whether- the connexion between the two 
 crowns had been continued or severed under the new con- 
 stitution of Germany, either the continuing or the severing 
 must have been marked by acts of war or diplomacy which 
 could not have failed to draw to themselves the deepest 
 attention in this kingdom. We may conceive all manner 
 of possible cases ; but in none of them could the people 
 of Great Britain have been indifferent to what was done. 
 As it was, beyond a languid curiosity as to the fate of 
 a foreign king who was also an English duke, men in 
 England cared hardly more for the fall of the kingdom 
 of Hanover than for the fall of the electorate of Hessen. 
 Perhaps, as there were other kingdoms in Germany but no 
 other electorate, the fall of Hessen might call forth the 
 deeper thoughts of the two. And there were minds to 
 which the fall of either kingdom or electorate seemed a 
 small matter beside the suppression of one of the few free 
 cities which still lived on in Europe. 
 
 I find myself discussing the events of 1866 before I have 
 well come to those of 1H37. But I think we see that 1837 
 is, after all, an important year, but a year whose im- 
 portance lies in the negative fact that, if the events of 1837 
 had been other than they were, the events of 1866 must 
 also have been other than they were. And again I think 
 we see that the indifference to continental dominion, either 
 for the sovereign of Great Britain or for the royal house 
 of Great Britain, which is to be marked both in 1837 
 and in 1866, is something which would hardly have been 
 possible in any earlier century. It was doubtless partly 
 due to the wise care with which the government of Great 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 9 
 
 Britain and the government of Hanover had been kept 
 wholly apart, so that the inhabitants of this island were 
 hardly ever reminded that their king was also a king on 
 the mainland. But it was due also, I cannot but think, 
 to a deeper cause. A feehng was growing up which had 
 begun to teach men to place the greatness of our island, 
 of its people and of its sovereign, in something else than 
 either in continental dominion within the bounds of Europe 
 or in any position at all within the bounds of Europe. It 
 is a feeling which, as regards Europe only, we might be 
 tempted to call insular, but which certainly cannot be 
 called insular as regards the world at large. That feeling 
 is one which specially overleaps the bounds of this island, 
 which indeed, in some of its shapes, seems ready, wittingly 
 or unwittingly, to give up many things which have hitherto 
 been looked on as essential to the greatness of this island. 
 It is a feeling which is capable of being turned in two 
 ways, one of which, I venture to think, is the nobler of the 
 two. It may either take the shape of a brotherly delight 
 in the greatness of the English folk, in the expansion of 
 its laws and speech and common being, a delight which 
 overleaps all thoughts of mere political allegiance, whose 
 special source of pride is the growth of an independent 
 England beyond the Western Ocean, and which yearns for 
 the day when that independent England shall have its 
 fellows in the newer lands of the South as well as of the 
 West. Or it may take the shape of delight in mere 
 dominion, dominion which, like brotherhood in the other 
 case, is more prized as it is more distant, a feehng which 
 welcomes a new province of the British crown with as 
 much glee as a new home of the Enghsh folk. The 
 feeling which refuses to be pent up within the bounds 
 of this island may take the shape of delight either in 
 the expansion wrought by Washington or in the ex- 
 pansion wrought by Chve. To-day I need not discuss 
 either much further, for, except possibly on one single 
 matter as yet far away, I am to-day called on to speak 
 
10 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 of either only in the points which they have in common. 
 My subject is Europe, and with regard to the continent of 
 Europe both feelings come to the same thing. The votaries 
 of British dominion and the votaries of English brotherhood 
 would alike shrink from the attempt to find a field for 
 the expansion of either among the settled kingdoms and 
 commonwealths of Europe. To neither could the event 
 of 1837, the separation • between the crowns of Hanover 
 and Great Britain, be any matter of sorrow. English 
 brotherhood assuredly was in no way wronged, British 
 dominion could hardly be wronged, by setting the sove- 
 reign of Great Britain free from a position in which 
 some kind of superiority had to be acknowledged in a 
 German diet, some possibly even in its Austrian President. 
 But in truth, in those days, though the materials for 
 both feelings were already in being, though one at least 
 had begun practically to work upon men's minds, neither 
 of them had as yet put on the same definite shapes 
 which they have since. I would not make bold to 
 say that the feeling for which I have had to plead at other 
 times, and for which I fear I may often have to plead 
 again, had then any conscious being on either side of 
 Ocean. And the other feeling of which I spoke, the sheer 
 delight in dominion, though it was certainly in being and 
 in vigorous being, had not yet clothed itself in a shape 
 so clearly cut and so easily recognized as it has since put 
 on. Nor had it yet taken to itself its distinguishing title 
 and watchword. We had abeady the Imperial Parliament 
 and the Imperial Bushel, and assuredly no man would 
 have scrupled then, any more than in much earlier times, 
 to use the name of ' Empire ' to add point to a telling piece 
 of poetry or rhetoric. But assuredly neither substantive 
 nor adjective was then so constantly in men's mouths as 
 they are now. Let us listen to the words of an English 
 statesman speaking within a few months of the beginning 
 of our period of fifty years. A speech made by Lord John 
 Russell on the sixteenth of January 1838 is not without 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 11 
 
 importance on this head. He speaks of " empire," but he 
 speaks of it in a rhetorical kind of way, as something 
 vague and distant, not as a name to be taken as glibly on 
 the lips as — I am almost quoting his own words — " a parish 
 or even as a kingdom." And, what is yet more to be 
 noticed, he does not speak of "empire" as anything de- 
 lightful and desirable, as anything of which to boast or 
 to brag. Lord John says ; 
 
 " If you will have plantations in every clime, if you will have subjects by 
 millions on opposite sides of the globe, if you will undertake to arrange the 
 affairs of an empire extending over both hemispheres, an empire on which the 
 sun never sets — whether such a determination on your parts be prudent or 
 impolitic, whether its effects be beneficial or detrimental to our highest 
 interests, I will not now stop to enquire." 
 
 If it was not the business of Lord John Russell to inquire 
 into that question then, still less is it my business now. 
 For my immediate field to-day hes in Europe only, while 
 Lord John Russell was speaking of a matter which touched 
 every quarter of the globe. And undoubtedly both circum- 
 stances and feelings have largely changed during the nine- 
 and-forty years that have passed since Lord John Russell 
 spoke. No one now claims to arrange the affairs of our 
 "plantations" — mark that the statesman of 1838 still uses 
 that good old name, now forgotten ; some perhaps are more 
 inclined to call in the plantations to arrange our affairs. 
 Still the feeling of which Lord John Russell spoke, the feel- 
 ing of British dominion, has assuredly not died out, and I 
 do trust that the higher feeling of English brotherhood has 
 gTOwn up by its side. But J am concerned with either of 
 those feelings — opposing feelings which yet, after all, have a 
 common root — only in so far as the being of either helps to 
 explain the way in which Englishmen looked on the event 
 of 1837. Having thus shown the first year of our period to 
 be negatively memorable, we may use it as a central point 
 from which to look backwards and forwards to years a 
 little earlier and a little later which were memorable in a 
 more positive way. As I before hinted, memorable events 
 
12 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 indeed had happened seven years before, and more memor- 
 able events still, their immediate fruits, were to happen 
 eleven years later. 
 
 The subject which I have undertaken is so large, it is 
 capable of being looked on from so many sides, that it is 
 well to choose one among them for our special, not neces- 
 sarily for our exclusive, attention. I design therefore to 
 speak mainly of the changes which our fifty years have 
 made in political geography, in the boundaries of states and 
 nations, and of the causes which have immediately led to 
 those changes. Foreign affairs, wars and treaties and their 
 results, the fall of old powers and the rise of new — perhaps 
 rather the restoration of the truly old at the cost of the 
 truly new — above all, that new birth of nations in which 
 our age has been so fruitful — these must be my main sub- 
 ject. Of the internal affairs of the several powers and 
 nations I shall speak only so far as they have a distinct 
 connexion with events which can be marked upon the map. 
 Many things I must pass by altogether. I must leave to 
 others to speak the panegyric of the last half-century as to 
 its social or its commercial advance, as to the fortunes of 
 literature, science, and art, as to the religious and ecclesias- 
 tical movements which have so largely marked the time. 
 My business is to comment on the map of Europe, the map 
 of Europe as it stood in 1837 and the map of Europe as it 
 stands in 1887. The map of Europe in any age I have 
 always found a stirring subject, and assuredly there has been 
 no time since the breaking up of the Carolingian dominion, 
 since the partition of Romania, by apostate crusaders, when 
 that map supplies a more stirring subject than is supplied 
 by the half-century which takes in the whole lives of many 
 of us, the whole active lives of most of us. When we look 
 at the map, we see that our own age has not been empty in 
 great events, that it has been an age which on the whole 
 has gone forward and not backward, except so far as it is 
 commonly hard to go forward except by in some sort going 
 backward. Look specially at the central peninsula, at the 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY, 13 
 
 central mainland, above all at the south-eastern corner. 
 The next half-century will have much to do which the 
 last half-century has left undone. It will have something 
 to undo which the last half-century has done. But on the 
 whole the domain of right has been widened, the domain of 
 wrong has been cut short. With some drawbacks, the 
 record of our age is on the whole a good one. It may be 
 left for the twentieth century — may it still be for the last 
 years of the nineteenth — to wipe out the great day of 
 shame and sorrow which marks the fifteenth. But those 
 years of the nineteenth century with which we are con- 
 cerned have at least gone far to undo the wrongs of the 
 fourteenth century. If the New Rome still weeps in bondage, 
 we have at least seen Nikopolis and Kossovo avenged. 
 
 In 1837 the geographical arrangements of Europe re- 
 mained for the most part in the same state in which they 
 had been fixed by the treaties which ended the wars of the 
 French Revolution. Whatever we think of those arrange- 
 ments, they were in themselves revolutionary, and in the 
 nature of things they could not be otherwise. In no land 
 which had been touched by the events which followed the 
 year 1789 could it have been possible to restore, even if 
 any one had really wished to restore, the state of things 
 which was before 1789. This truth is obvious; it will 
 hardly be disputed ; yet it is needful to insist on it, because 
 there was at the time, and there possibly is still, a certain 
 disposition to look on the arrangements against which 
 men arose in 1830 and in 1848 as an old-established 
 state of things, as a venerable and conservative state of 
 things, against which mere reckless revolutionary inno- 
 vators arose. And such in truth those who arose against 
 them showed themselves in many things. But they were 
 not a whit more reckless, not a whit more revolutionary, 
 than the princes against whose work they rose. There 
 could be none of the real charm of antiquity about a 
 system which in the first of the two years spoken of had 
 lived only fifteen years and in the second had lived only 
 
14 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 thirty-three. But, if that system could boast of no anti- 
 quity, it did contrive to put on a certain outward garb of 
 authority. The creations of princes do somehow come 
 to look venerable in men's eyes sooner than the creations 
 of the nations. The Holy Alliance had a very solemn look ; 
 it was young, but it had that air of preternatural age, 
 wisdom, and virtue, which sometimes comes early in life. 
 And we may be sure that* the success of the great Austrian 
 imposture had something to do with the general success of 
 the system of which that imposture formed a leading 
 part. Mankind would hardly have endured that a mere 
 Count of Tyrol, a mere King of Hungary, even a mere 
 Duke of Austria, should seize again on Milan and on 
 Venice. In one who still bore the title which he had cast 
 aside and the blazonry to which he had ceased to have a 
 right, the ugliness of the thing was somewhat veiled. 
 Equally innovating, equally revolutionary, was a Duke of 
 Savoy reigning at Genoa, a King of Prussia reigning at 
 Koln and Aachen, a King of Bavaria playing the dragon of 
 Wantley on both sides of the Rhine. To princes working 
 their unrestrained will houses and churches were indeed 
 geese and turkeys ; free cities and sovereign bishoprics 
 were alike a convenient prey. Perhaps we need not weep 
 that a Bishop of Wiirzburg, Duke of the Eastern Francia, 
 no longer bears the sword as well as the crosier; but 
 we may surely weep that the once free imperial city of 
 Nlirnberg is not allowed to keep at least that measure 
 of freedom which still belongs to Liibeck, Bremen, and 
 Hamburg. All these things were surely as truly revo- 
 lutionary innovations as any change which the Corsican 
 '• stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis " had wrought be- 
 fore them ; they were as truly revolutionary as any change 
 which the men of 1848 or of i860 wrought or strove to 
 work after them. The princes, after all, did only like 
 other men ; they respected antiquity, they were moved by 
 traditional sentiment, whenever so to be moved suited 
 their purpose. They trampled all under foot when anti- 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 15 
 
 quity and tradition stood in their way. They took care 
 to restore the Pope, the kings, the dukes ; they forgot to 
 restore the commonwealths. The next set of innovators 
 and revolutionists strove to restore the commonwealths and 
 to get rid of the kings and dukes. Each did after its 
 kind ; but one was no more revolutionary than the other. 
 The men who in 1848 proclaimed the restoration of a 
 Venetian commonwealth which many could remember 
 could hardly be charged with innovation by the votaries 
 of an empire of Austria of which a greater number still 
 had seen the birth. Those who proclaimed a common- 
 wealth of Kome fell back on memories yet more ancient, 
 so much more ancient that they might seem to have ceased 
 to be practical. The mere attempt to call into being things 
 and names which have passed away for ages is of all 
 things the most unreal. Yet we may relax a little when 
 we remember that many of us have known in this place 
 one who has played no small part in Roman and Sicilian 
 history, one of a triumvkate which did not reign by pro- 
 scription, one who, among many proconsuls, prancing and 
 otherwise, has been, since Quintus Fabius and Marcus 
 Minucius in one memorable year, the only man in the 
 world's history who ever led a following with pro dictatore 
 as his style and title. 
 
 The pro-dictatorship of Aurelio Saffi, like the dictatorship 
 of Giuseppe Garibaldi, belongs to a stage of our subject 
 somewhat later than that which we have now reached. 
 And when we come to them, they may to some seem 
 strange and revolutionary. But surely neither name nor 
 thing was so new, so strange, so revolutionary, as some 
 things which to many minds have seemed venerable and 
 even ancient. The world had seen two pro-dictators before 
 Aurelio Saffi ; it had never seen an Emperor of the French 
 before Napoleon Buonaparte ; it had never seen an Emperor 
 of Austria before that Francis who laid aside what he per- 
 haps did not know to be the highest place on earth. The 
 French invention was new; the Austrian imitation was 
 
16 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 newer. The invention showed at least a certain boldness of 
 original conception; the imitation, well as the imposture has 
 worked for its own purposes, was in the beginning mere 
 servile copying. So too a King of Italy at least calls up more 
 venerable thoughts than a King of Prussia or of Wiirtem- 
 berg. In plain truth, in making the arrangements of 1815 
 one upstart system passed away to make room for another. 
 Mind, I again repeat, it .could not be otherwise ; in revo- 
 lutionary times men must be revolutionists ; the princes 
 who mapped out Europe in 18 14 and 1815 have much to 
 answer for ; that they represented a new state of things 
 and not an old one was not their fault. All I ask is that 
 the men who arose against a very modern state of things 
 shall at least not be charged with trampling immemorial 
 antiquity under foot. 
 
 In the change between the Europe of 1815 and the 
 Europe of our own day we mark six chief periods, one 
 earlier than the beginning of our own half-century, the 
 rest later. 1830, 1848, 1859-1860, 1866, 1 870-1 871, and 
 1878, are the times w^hich before all others have changed 
 the world in which I was born and which I can dimly 
 remember into the world in which we are now living. 
 Of these years, 1 830 comes before our artificial begiuning, 
 but in 1830 men stretched out their hands to feel after 
 the events of 1848 and even after the events of i860 and 
 1870. In 1830 then the arrangements of 1814-18 15 were 
 stUl in force. Between 1815 and 1830 there had been, 
 specially in southern Europe, not a few internal move- 
 ments against the system which had been forced upon 
 the nations ; but it was in the south-eastern lands alone 
 that there had been any actual change of boundary. It 
 was something that the changes that had been made 
 were of the happiest. Greece had won her iudependence ; 
 her boundary, her dynasty, her constitution, were still 
 uncertain, but it was at least agreed that some part or 
 other of the Greek lands should be set free. Bimidium 
 facti qui ccept liahet. It was at last admitted, not much 
 
I.J FIFTY YFAES OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 17 
 
 to the liking of princes and diplomatists, that lands and 
 nations might be set free from the yoke of one despot, 
 without being necessarily handed over to the keeping of 
 another. The deliverance of Greece, more truly of a small 
 piece of Greece, was the beginning of the better state of 
 things in which we live. Alongside of that great turning- 
 point in the history of the right and freedom of nations, we 
 may leave to powers and their representatives the discussion 
 of certain small transfers at the mouth of the Danube which 
 have been unmade and made again two or three times 
 since, and which specially need to be unmade and made 
 again once more. 
 
 In the rest of Europe the boundaries of 1815 remained 
 in 1830, and, with one more exception, the boundaries 
 of 1830 remained in 1837. In the Scandinavian peninsula 
 things remained as they were and as they remain still ; 
 Sweden and Noi'way were then, as now, separate kingdoms 
 under a single king ; Finland had passed away, to keep, under 
 the Russian Tzar as its Grand Duke, the old political insti- 
 tutions of the Swedish realm from which it had been parted, 
 and to keep them, as later years have shown, longer than the 
 Swedish realm itself. The Danish king was stiU duke of 
 duchies on each side of that Eider which, once "Romani 
 terminus imperii," stiU kept its place as parting Sleswick, 
 no part of the German Confederation, from Holstein and 
 Lauenburg, duchies within its bounds. The position of 
 a prince, part of whose dominions lay within and pai*t 
 without the bounds of the Confederation, was then shared 
 by the King of Denmark with the Kings of Hungary, 
 Prussia, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. In the case 
 of Great Britain the fact that that relation came to an 
 end in 1837 was the starting-point of our discourse; but 
 we may again stop to mark the practical difference of 
 that relation in the case of an island sovereign and of a 
 sovereign whose dominions held in one character lay 
 adjacent to those which he held in the other. The King 
 of Great Britain and the King of Hanover were practically 
 
18 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 two distinct persons ; but the King of Prussia and the 
 Margrave of Brandenburg, the King of Denmark and the 
 Duke of Holstein, the King of Hungary and the Archduke 
 of Austria, were in each case very conspicuously the same 
 person, and many of the chief events of our later story 
 came of the fact that they were in each case the same 
 person. Still Germany had after all some feeble approach 
 to national unity; lax as the federal bond was, it did at 
 least assert the existence of some nearer tie between 
 German and German than there was between the German 
 and the man of other nations. Italy had not even reached 
 this small measure of unity. It was still a geographical 
 expression and nothing more. A younger generation, used 
 to an Italian kingdom stretching from Como to Syracuse 
 and taking its place among the great powers of Europe, 
 may find it hard to throw itself into the state and the 
 feelings of the days when Italy was still split up into 
 petty despotisms, despotisms not even bound together by 
 the lax tie which united the states of Germany, and each 
 of them maintained against the will of its people by the 
 brute force of the stranger. And the thought that things 
 ever could be otherwise was mocked at by the wise men of 
 that day exactly as the thought that things may some day 
 be otherwise than they are in other lands is mocked at 
 by the wise men of our own day. The Austrian still 
 reigned over Venice and Milan, and I can well remember 
 a sage in the Quarterly Review proving to the satisfaction 
 of all practical politicians that no one else ever could or 
 ever ought to reign there in his stead. Such memories as 
 this may be some little comfort when we hear later sages 
 proving no less to demonstration that none but the Turk 
 ever can or ever ought to reign in Constantinople. To the 
 west of the Austrian intruder, the House of Savoy reigned 
 on both sides of the Alps, in its own Burgundian cradle, 
 no less than over Piedmont, Montferrat, Nizza, Genoa, and 
 the island from which it took its highest title. Not yet 
 the model state of Italy in the sense in which it became in 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 19 
 
 after days, it was already in some sort the hope of Italy, 
 the one Italian land — tiny Monaco was hardly a land — 
 ruled by an Italian princely house. The rest of Italy was 
 parted out between the Dukes — an Austrian here, a Bourbon 
 there — the Roman Bishop with his dominions stretching 
 from Ravenna to Terracina, and the Sicilian kingdoms, 
 still the spoil of a Spanish Bourbon. In 1830, in 1837, all 
 that was left of the brighter days of Italy was the small 
 survival of freedom which the despots still allowed to live 
 on in harmless San Marino. Germany, ruled by native 
 princes, keeping some forms of national unity, and with the 
 freedom of old times still spared in four of her cities, was 
 at least a fairer sight than this.^ 
 
 The movements of 1830 made but one direct change in 
 the map, but some other changes which came of them might 
 be thought to go beyond mere changes in internal govern- 
 ment. The map of Europe in 1837 contained one European 
 state which had no being in the map of 1 830. The parting 
 asunder of Belgium from the kingdom of the Netherlands 
 was as direct a blow to the supposed eternal arrangements 
 of 1 8 1 5 as the union of the Rouman principalities, the later 
 union of the Bulgarian principalities, have been to later ar- 
 rangements which were meant to be no less eternal. In all 
 three cases alike the nations rose to undo the work of despots 
 and diplomatists, whose bidding the nations cast aside as 
 having no right over them but the right of the stronger. 
 But the Belgian movement which changed the map was but 
 the second act of the French movement which left the map 
 as it was. And yet may we not say that the map was 
 changed ? When France gave again to the king whom she 
 chose the older style of his predecessors, when the " Rex 
 Francorum" of old again supplanted the later " Rex Francife 
 et Navarrae," the restoration of the ancient title, the title 
 that bespoke chieftainship of the people and not mere 
 lordship of the soil, was looked on by not a few as a wicked 
 revolutionary innovation. And revolutionary enough it 
 was ; wicked from their point of view it might be ; an 
 
 c 2 
 
20 FIFTY YEAUS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 innovation at least it was not. Only, if we indulge in a 
 truly microscopic accuracy, it might, be called a geogra- 
 phical change when a king, no less than an emperor or a 
 commonwealth, ruled over the little scrap of Spain north 
 of the Pyrenees without taking therefrom any addition to 
 his titles of kingship. France was clearly enlarged when 
 Navarre was wholly merged in it ^. But de tninimis tion curat 
 lex ; and it might be thought an equally microscopic fact 
 that, as one of the fruits of the same movement, the canton 
 of Basel became the two half-centons of Baselstadt and Basel- 
 land. The French, the Belgian, and the Swiss movements 
 were all parts of the same stir, all forerunners of greater 
 stirs to come ; but the general geography of Europe knows 
 only that turning about of things by which those provinces 
 of the Netherlands which were once specially known as 
 " obedient " set the first great example of disobedience to the 
 will of Europe, and refused the king whom Europe had set 
 over them. The point of view which a patriotic Fleming 
 or Walloon would take at the moment was clear enough ; 
 yet, from a wider European point of view, we may be 
 allowed to ask whether it might not have been better if 
 two kindred nations could have contrived to live together, 
 and to keep a stronger barrier than there now is at the 
 point where a barrier power is most needed. All these 
 attempts at putting a barrier between the great Eomance 
 and the great Teutonic power, the neutrality of Belgium, 
 the neutrality of Savoy, the neutrality of Switzerland, the 
 neutrality of Luxemburg, the neutrality of Elsass-Lothringen 
 of which some whispers have been heard more lately, have 
 all been only partial strivings in the direction of that 
 
 * The greater part of Navarre had, I need hardly say, been held by the Spanish 
 kings from Ferdinand the Catholic onwards. Henry the Fourth of France, 
 as King of Navarre, actually held only the small part of that kingdom which 
 lay north of the Pyrenees. He changed the old style of *' Rex Francorum " 
 into " Kex Franciae et Navarrae," which of course implies that Navarre is some- 
 thing distinct from France. In 1791, and again in 1830, the old style of the 
 kings was restored, a style which implies that Navarre is merged in France, 
 as the French part of it certainly is. 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 21 
 
 Middle Kingdom the last real hope of which died out with 
 Charles of Burgundy, but after which some statesmen are 
 said to have yearned even in the eighteenth century. And 
 yet, if a Middle Kingdom could be again called into being 
 by a word, it would be but an artificial creation to meet 
 a political need. Some members of the Komance and some 
 of the Teutonic people would have to consent to sacrifice 
 themselves for their brethren, and to agree to dwell together 
 how they might, in order to keep the greater masses of their 
 several nations from clashing in endless rivalry. The 
 experience of Switzerland shows that an artificial nation 
 may, under favourable circumstances, grow up out of 
 elements differing in race and speech, but it may be 
 doubted whether the will of a diplomatic congress could 
 secure to a power called into being to serve a special 
 purpose any longer life than fell to the lot of the dominion 
 of the Burgundian Valois, or to the creation of diplomacy 
 which fell asunder in 1830. 
 
 Let us now turn to another side of Europe, where 
 another Middle Kingdom more lately stood in the gap 
 between rival and threatening powers. If Europe once 
 had its Burgundy in the West, it had in far more recent 
 times its Poland in the East. Burgundy, we may say, 
 fell to pieces of itself; Poland was artificially cut in pieces, 
 hardly to the lasting advantage of the rulers who were 
 enriched by its spoils. In our view to be sure the three 
 partitions are things which have passed away no less 
 than the Lithuanian dominions of Gedymin and Witold ; 
 but the kingdom of Poland formed in 1815 was still in 
 being in 1830; all but its name had passed away before 
 1837. The map can hardly be said to be changed; the 
 words " Kingdom of Poland " ought in strictness stiU to be 
 there ; but they have lost even the little survival of mean- 
 ing which they kept in 1830. And here we may ask a 
 question, we may throw out a subject for some of our 
 historical essayists or historical debaters. Within a few 
 years the despotic princes of Russia added to their own 
 
22 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 realm two states, both of which alike were to be joined to 
 the Russian crown by a lasting personal union, but were to 
 remain wholly distinct from the Russian empire in their 
 laws and administration. The duchy of Finland, won in 
 warfare, kept its old constitution ; the kingdom of Poland, 
 created by diplomacy, received a new constitution. In 
 both alike, as Grand Duke and as King, the despotic Em- 
 peror submitted his will to rules of law which were un- 
 heard of in his empire. Why, we may ask, did this 
 singular kind of union succeed in Finland, while it so 
 lamentably failed in Poland? Finland has had no com- 
 plaints to make against its Russian grand dukes; Poland 
 has had every complaint to make against its Russian kings. 
 What are the causes of this remarkable difference in two 
 cases which have so much in common ? Some causes seem, 
 at first sight at least, to lie on the surface ; others may 
 perhaps lie deeper ; I will not enlarge on either, as I wish 
 to throw the subject out for the examination of others.^ 
 I have only to make my first summary, to show the first 
 picture of my series. I have to set forth the Europe of 1837 
 as still the Europe of 1830, the Europe of 1815, changed in 
 its spirit, seeking to be other than it is. It has seen poli- 
 tical changes of no small moment in many lands, but the 
 map of Europe is not perceptibly changed, save where a 
 kingdom of Greece and a kingdom of Belgium have come 
 
 ^ I will add thus much, speaking no longer ex cathedra. The relation of 
 both Poland and Finland to Russia was strictly the relation of Home Rule, 
 that is, the relation of a dependency which manages its own internal affairs. 
 It is essential to the nature of Home Rule that it should be the relation of a 
 dependency ; an union on any terms between two or more equal states is 
 something else and not Home Rule. Without going into the causes why 
 Home Rule succeeded in Finland and failed in Poland, the fact that it has 
 done so proves that Home Rule is like any other political relation, that it may 
 succeed in one case and fail in another. Therefore, to turn for a moment to 
 immediate controversies, to argue that, owing to some special circumstances, 
 Home Rule is likely to fail in some particular case, is a reasonable argument, 
 capable perhaps of being met by reasonable arguments the other way. But to 
 declaim against Home Rule as something new or absurd in itself is to fly in 
 the face of history ; and to call Home Rule a " disintegration of the empire " 
 is like all other talk about '' empire " and " disintegration." 
 
L] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 23 
 
 into being, and where Greece might envy Belgium the king 
 whom a brighter fate had once seemed to offer to herself. 
 
 From 1837 we might spring with a light bound to 1848, 
 as far as the general look of the map of Europe is con- 
 cerned. But in the meanwhile one change had taken place, 
 small in geographical extent, but deep in moral significance. 
 The shoi-t list of European commonwealths was made 
 shoi-ter still to enlarge the dominions of a despot. The 
 last feeble relic of an independent nation was wiped out 
 to swell the power that lives by trampling the rights 
 of nations underfoot. As long as the commonwealth of 
 Cracow was allowed to keep any shadow of freedom, a 
 man of Polish birth might stand in his ancient capital, 
 by the tombs of his ancient kings, and not feel himself 
 altogether the bondman of a stranger. From 1846 on- 
 ward that small measure of national memory and national 
 hope has no longer been allowed. Of the three spoilers 
 of the Polish land, the city which still represented its 
 being was again handed over to that one whose share 
 in the spoliation admitted of the least excuse. The last 
 fragment of free Poland was given to the power which 
 owed its very being to Polish help ; Cracow went the way 
 of Venice and Milan, of Cattaro and Ragusa, to enlarge the 
 family estate of the House of Habsburg and Lorraine. Look 
 we on for two years longer, and the whole world seems 
 ablaze. Again a riot in Paris has been accepted as a revolu- 
 tion in France, and a revolution in France has been enough 
 to stir all Europe to its depths. In 1 848 and 1 849 the map 
 of Europe was indeed changed. . Then at last the thoughts 
 of thirty years, the livelier thoughts of eighteen years, 
 seemed for a while to have become deeds. Then indeed, 
 
 **Amid the roar of liberated Rome, 
 Of nations freed, and a world overjoyed," 
 
 we seemed to see a new estate of brighter things rise up 
 out of the darkness of bondage. United Germany, free 
 Italy, an Italy of the type of her two times of glory, 
 showed themselves, if only as a glimpse given of what 
 
24 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 might be. We might forget the wrongs of Ragusa and of 
 Cracow when there was once more a commonwealth of Venice 
 and a commonwealth of Rome. The one kingly house of 
 Italian birth leaped at once to its true position as the 
 champion-stock of Italy; Piedmont entered on her glorious 
 mission ; she bore the brunt of the battle in the north ; in 
 the south, when Sicily had again driven forth the stranger, 
 she gave the delivered island a king of her own choice to 
 fill the empty throne of the Rogers, the Williams, and the 
 Fredericks. And how fared the King of Lombardy and 
 Venice, the King of Galicia and Lodomeria, the King of 
 Bohemia and Illyria, the King of Hungary, Croatia, and 
 Dalmatia ? It is enough to reckon up the kingdoms of that 
 
 to tell the whole tale of duchies, counties, and lordships, 
 the time would fail us. We need not stoop to reckonings 
 merely personal ; if not Amurath to Amurath, yet Ferdinand 
 succeeds to Francis and Francis to Ferdinand. Let those 
 whose memories do not go back to those stirring years 
 strive to press deep into their minds the events of days 
 when the chief of the House of Habsburg and Lorraine, 
 cast forth by the German and the Magyar, disowned at 
 Vienna, disowned at Budapest, was brought back by the 
 swords of the Slave and the Rouman, to reign over con- 
 quered Hungary and Austria by the grace of Nicolas of 
 Russia and Jellafeic of Croatia. Things have so greatly 
 changed in eight-and-thirty years that it seems harder to 
 call back the great events which we ourselves heard of as 
 the morning's news than to speU out the events of distant 
 ages in the chronicle or on the graven stone. And to 
 remember that all passed away like a dream, that the 
 movement of 1848 left no trace whatever on the European 
 map, that the commonwealths sank again into the eai*th, 
 that the despots came back to their thrones, that once more 
 
 "Kingdoms had shrunk to provinces, and chains 
 Clanked over sceptred cities." 
 
 Venice, Verona, Milan, passed again under the yoke ; the 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 25 
 
 new commonwealth of France lent itself to overthrow the 
 new commonwealth of Eome ; central Italy again became 
 the realm of a shepherd who needed foreign bayonets to 
 guard him against his flock ; Sicily had again to exchange 
 the Savoyard of her choice for the Bourbon of her loathing. 
 Order, in the despot's sense, reigned in Italy ; only in the 
 one happier corner, schooling himself for the high calling 
 that destiny had laid upon him, King Honest-Man cast 
 aside all the arts of aU the tempters ; and, while he lived 
 and reigned, Italy had hope. 
 
 The events of 1848 and 1849 mainly touched central 
 Europe. To be sure the most central land of all seized the 
 happy opportunity, while the thoughts of the despots were 
 turned elsewhere, to reproduce on modern European soil 
 those wise models of the true federal system which had as 
 yet been seen only in far distant ages or in a far distant 
 continent. Switzerland had her local revolutions in 1830 ; 
 she had her civil war in 1 847 ; she learned her lesson, and 
 in 1848 she placed herself, as a political creation, as a 
 political study, alongside of ancient Lykia and younger 
 America. Thus the specially revolutionary years, 1789 
 and 1848, have in the federal lands of either hemisphere 
 a memory opposite to revolutionary, unless revolution it be 
 to put an end to chaos and call order into being. At the 
 extreme ends of Europe, western, eastern, northern, the 
 year was not specially marked. There may very likely 
 have been a Spanish revolution or two, or a war of a 
 disputed succession ; but to keep count of Spanish revolu- 
 tions and Spanish civil wars you must needs have a special 
 Spanish professor. I can only look at the map, and see 
 that there is no visible change. But it must be borne in 
 mind that there was one kingdom whose king did not wait 
 to be compelled by revolution to grant freedom to his 
 people. The one lawful despot in Europe, despot by the 
 grant of the nation, Frederick the Seventh of Denmark, 
 granted his people a constitution as the first act of his 
 reign, before stirs in France and earlier stirs in Sicily had 
 
26 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 begun to frighten his brother kings elsewhere. Dare I say 
 a word on the relations between the Danish crown and the 
 duchies which have since passed away from its wearers? 
 As for the legal aspect of the case, I once went through 
 no small amount of reading on that subject ; but I con- 
 fess that I found the geographical fact of the Eider and 
 the pentameter verse which I have abeady quoted a good 
 deal easier to a plain understanding than the genealogical 
 subtleties of the royal and ducal lines. But one broader 
 political lesson may perhaps be drawn. When the feeling 
 of nationality is once aroused, a minority of one race and 
 speech placed alongside of a majority of another will 
 often feel less dissatisfaction under a common despotism 
 which presses equally on all than under a parliamentary 
 union which brings freedom and its blessings to one side, 
 but which can hardly be said to extend them to the side 
 which is of necessity always outvoted. I will not further 
 press the argument, which is indeed capable of application 
 in more ways than one. 
 
 Thus far I have been dealing wholly with the affairs of 
 other nations. The British islands, like the Scandinavian 
 peninsula, had contributed but little in any way, absolutely 
 nothing in the way of geographical change, to the history 
 of Europe during nine and thirty years. Since the be- 
 ginning of our special half-century, we played for seventeen 
 years no part whatever in the stirring events of the time. 
 We have plenty to record within our own shores, little or 
 nothing in the general history of Europe. With the year 
 1854 things suddenly and strangely changed. Then, for 
 the first time since the end of the wars of the French 
 Revolution, we find Great Britain engaged, in close brother- 
 hood with the new ruler of France, the representative of 
 the old enemy, helping him in warfare against a sovereign 
 and a people which had assuredly done no wrong either to 
 France or to Great Britain. Whether it was right and 
 holy that Christian blood should be shed by Christian 
 hands for no cause but to keep down the yoke of the 
 
I.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 27 
 
 misbeliever upon unwilling Christian nations, judge ye. 
 The thing at least was strange, it was at least new ; one 
 might venture to call it revolutionary. And to the historic 
 mind, the soil which was chosen as the seat of this amazing 
 warfare, the soil on which the men of France and of Britain 
 fought with the Turk as their ally, might seem strange 
 indeed. The land of Crim, the old Tauric Chersonesos, the 
 last dwelling-place of so many things that were venerable 
 and noble, the last home of the free Greek and the free 
 Goth, the last remnant of European soil that clave to the 
 rule of Rome transplanted,^ became the seat of warfare 
 waged to prolong the rule of the barbarian in Christian 
 lands. Then, strange as the sight would have seemed in 
 earlier days, the cross of Saint George and the crescent of 
 Antichrist floated side by side over the ruins of the last of 
 Hellenic commonwealths. Some, I believe, there still are, 
 who look on the warfare of those years as a worthy work, 
 ToiavTTqv arhpayaOiriv i'oixl(ovt€s. And what was the issue ? 
 A slight change truly on the map of Europe ; the frontier 
 between Russia and Moldavia was kept away from the 
 Danube. But more than this, the wisdom of Europe in 1 856 
 devised some other provisions which were to be as eternal 
 and unchangeable as the provisions of 18 15. One of those 
 eternal provisions had been that none of the house of 
 Buonaparte should ever sit on the throne of France. A 
 witness before all things to the vanity of such provisions, 
 a ruler of the house of Buonaparte was foremost in de- 
 creeing the ordinances which were again to be for ever- 
 lasting. Alas for the eternity of despots and diplomatists ; 
 their everlasting lasts only till the nations feel their 
 strength and march on to undo the work to which they 
 
 * It should not be forgotten that the last Greek commonwealth was that of 
 Cherson, that the last fragment of Roman power in the East was the " Peraia " 
 held by the Trapezuntine Emperors in the Tauric Chersonesos. The geography 
 of those parts is greatly confused by the absurd nomenclature of modern 
 Eussia. The old names have been revived, but they have been moved to new- 
 places. Thus modern Cherson has nothing to do with old Cherson, which ia 
 represented by Sebastopol. 
 
28 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 
 
 never gave the sanction of their will. The wisdom of 
 Europe guaranteed the independence and integrity of the 
 Ottoman Empire ; that is, translating the jargon of di- 
 plomacy into the language of fact, it decreed that not an 
 inch of Christian soil should ever be set free from its 
 barbarian masters. Such was the wisdom of the wise, the 
 counsel of princes and their envoys. The nations have 
 judged otherwise. Look at the south-eastern Europe which 
 the wisdom of 1856 would have kept for ever, and look 
 at the south-eastern Europe that is now. 
 
 Truly the arrangements of 1856 were made only to follow 
 the arrangements of 18 15 ; the wisdom of Paris was to go 
 the way of the wisdom of Vienna. But we have not yet to 
 deal with the process by which right and freedom won their 
 victory over the second set of European arrangements. We 
 have not as yet wholly done with the first. In 1 856 a large 
 part of the arrangements of 1815, upset for a moment in 
 1848, lived on still. The two touched different parts of 
 Europe. 18 15 had dealt mainly with the central lands and 
 the central peninsula; it was the south-eastern lands for 
 whose bondage Europe provided in 1 856. In our present 
 story the south-eastern lands have as yet come before us 
 only for a moment. The main interest still gathers round 
 the central lands, round Germany and Italy, the one striv- 
 ing for fuller national unity, the other striving after some 
 national being in any shape. The next great events of our 
 half-century, events which did indeed change the map of 
 Europe, are those which gave birth to a free Italian king- 
 dom. These are the events of 1859 and i860, by which the 
 European settlement of 18 15 was finally got rid of in the 
 central peninsula of Europe. Those events, events which 
 form altogether the brightest side of our tale of fifty years, 
 will make the opening subject of my second lecture. 
 
LECTIJEE II. 
 
 (November io, 1887.) 
 
 A WEEK back we traced the events of the first nineteen 
 years of that half-century of which, in its relations to the 
 map of Europe, I have now undertaken to speak. We 
 traced at least certain classes of its events with which alone 
 my subject was immediately concerned. But in dealing 
 with the events of those nineteen years, we have had to look 
 back to a time before the beginning of those nineteen years. 
 We have had often to cast an eye to 1830, sometimes to 
 3815. For in truth down to 1859 the main features of 
 1815, above all as regarded boundaries, were still in being 
 and in full force. The system had indeed received some 
 rude shocks. It was, as we have already marked, the 
 French movement of 1830 which led to the European 
 movement of 1848. In Germany and Italy the movement 
 of 1 848 seemed, as far as outward appearance went, to have 
 passed away without fruits ; things had come back as they 
 were before the rising. Better things to come were indeed 
 foreshadowed in the position of constitutional Piedmont, 
 and even in the fact that a French garrison was needed in 
 Rome. But these things were merely signs of the future. 
 The disposition of power, the extent of the dominions 
 of each power, were still essentially the same in 1859 
 as they had been settled in 1815. The great powers of 
 Europe were still Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the three 
 which then were oddl}^ called Northern, and the powers of 
 the West, France and Great Britain. There was still the 
 German Confederation, with the Austrian as its President 
 and the HohenzoUern as his rival. But again a change 
 which made no change in boundaries, another change in the 
 internal government of France, had given a new aspect to 
 the face of Europe. I have already pointed out, perhaps 
 
30 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 somewhat casually, the importance of the mere fact that a 
 Buonaparte reigned in France as a sign that the arrange- 
 ments on which the very being of Europe had been held to 
 depend had largely given way. In France, as elsewhere, 
 the immediate work of 1 848 soon passed away ; but it did 
 not, as in so many other lands, pass away through foreign 
 interference. Its passing away moreover did not take the 
 shape of a restoration of the state of things that was before 
 1848. The commonwealth of France, the commonwealth 
 that slew her Roman sister, was overthrown by the con- 
 spiracy of its own chief, and there came again, not the 
 kingship of either branch of Bourbon, but the revived 
 empire of Buonaparte. That empire, the empire which was 
 declared to be embodied peace, was mainly marked by 
 three great wars, each of which changed the face of Europe, 
 the second and third of which changed it very largely. Of 
 the first of these wars, the war of Crimea, I have akeady 
 said somewhat ; but the wars of 1854, of 1859, and of 1870, 
 may, from one point of view, be grouped together. It would 
 seem that the new ruler of France, doubtful of his position 
 among princes, was minded to make his place among 
 them better acknowledged by attacking the great military 
 powers in succession, and that in each case he strove to 
 colour his purpose by entangling some free people to join 
 his alliance. In the first case this policy fully succeeded ; 
 in the second it succeeded only partially; in the third it 
 failed altogether. The ruler of France attacked in turn 
 Russia, Austria, and Prussia. He coloured the first attempt 
 by an alliance with England ; he coloured the second by an 
 alliance with Piedmont ; he hoped, but hoped in vain, to 
 colour the third by the alliance of some of the other 
 German states. Part of his declared mission was to avenge 
 Waterloo, and perhaps he could not have avenged Waterloo 
 so thoroughly by any defeat of the British power in the 
 field as he avenged it by entangling Great Britain into an 
 alliance with himself, an alliance in which she was made 
 his tool in the first of his schemes of aggression. Those 
 
IT.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 31 
 
 schemes succeeded; no territory was won, because no terri- 
 tory was sought for; but what was sought for was won, 
 European position, military fame, the humbling of one of 
 the great despotisms in concert with a free people, with 
 two free peoples rather, as we must not forget that Pied- 
 mont also sent her contingent to the army that had gone to 
 the help of the Turk. And if it be lawful to admire a mere 
 stroke of cunning policy, apart from all thought of the right 
 and wrong of a cause, perhaps no such stroke ever better 
 deserved to be admired than that which sent the contingent 
 of Piedmont to the help of the Turk. It was shown how 
 Italians could fight ; the sub-Alpine kingdom made its 
 European position at a stroke, and it established a claim on 
 two European powers at the risk of very little danger from 
 the third which was made an enemy. No small step 
 towards the making of Italy was taken by the banks of the 
 Tchernaja. How much had been gained was shown when 
 the second act of the drama came to be played, when 
 Austria was to be attacked with Piedmont as an ally, an 
 ally who, it was hoped, might also become an useful tool. 
 The plan of the master of France was to use the one free 
 Italian state to win glory and territory for France without 
 winning freedom for Italy. But the one free Italian state 
 was too many for the plotter. When Piedmont rose, Italy 
 followed. The tyrant found, to his amazement, that he had 
 called a nation into life. Pledged to free Italy from the 
 Alps to the Hadriatic, he found it convenient to draw back 
 at the Mincio, and to leave Verona and Venice to his fellow- 
 despot. Some talk about Italian confederation followed, 
 as if designed, like some later talk which plays with the 
 same word, to bring the work of Aratos and Washington 
 into disrepute. It may indeed be that some more reason- 
 ably planned Italian confederation might have been the 
 right thing for Italy. But Italy could have nothing to say 
 to a confederation of which the Austrian and the Pope 
 were to be members. The name of confederation, coming 
 as the last shift of a bafiled tyrant, naturally stank in their 
 
32 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 nostrils, and Italy rose to life and freedom in the shape of 
 an united kingdom. 
 
 The ruler of France went back to France decked with 
 the laurels of Magenta and Solferino, and enriched with 
 the more solid plunder of Savoy and Nizza. He had 
 done half a day's work, and he had taken the pay for 
 two days. Verona and Venice could bear witness that he 
 had broken his word ; but then all France could bear 
 witness that he had broken a promise far more solemn. 
 "I will free Italy from the Alps to the Hadriatic" 
 was a pledge in no way more binding than the earlier 
 pledge, " I will be faithful to the democratic commonwealth." 
 It would be instructive if some developement of science 
 could enable us to look into the heart of a despot ; it would 
 even be something if we could see two despots, like two 
 augurs, when they meet face to face with no honest man to 
 look on them. How did those two look who met at Villa- 
 franca and shut the door on him who was before all things 
 the Honest Man? We plain folk know only the result; 
 from the Mincio to the Hadriatic Italy was not set free. 
 As for Savoy, let us stop and think a little. The wrath 
 and scorn which were stirred in all honest hearts at 
 the annexation of that land by France was natural and 
 righteous, but it was a little out of place. When we stand 
 by the lake of Bourget, when we cross to the tombs at 
 Hautecombe, the sentimental feeling overcomes us. It 
 gives us a turn to think that a Duke of Savoy should have 
 bartered away the cradle of his house, even though some 
 provision was made on behalf of the tombs of his fathers. 
 Fut the solid wrong lay in another quai-ter. If we leave 
 the lake of Bourget to look out from the free land of Vaud 
 over the greater lake of Leman. it is with a kind of fear 
 that we see the mountains on the other shore, the neutral 
 shore whose neutrality was to be one of the feeble guaranties 
 of European peace, no longer Bernese, no longer Savoyard, 
 but gone to swell the might, sometimes of a Parisian 
 empire, sometimes of a Parisian commonwealth. Yet more, 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 33 
 
 let us stand on any point of the soil of the canton of 
 Geneva, and we look up at the heights, French heights on 
 either side, with a distinct feeling of being in prison. Here 
 is the real wrong; Savoy was not an Italian land; its 
 separation was, except as the loss of a recruiting-ground 
 for stout fighting-men, no loss to Italy. The speech of 
 Savoy is not Italian ; we can hardly say that its history 
 was Italian. A land of the Middle Kingdom, a land whose 
 head was neither at Paris nor at Milan but at Aries, its 
 princes had, in various ways, won dominion on both sides 
 of the Alps, and they had in the course of ages been con- 
 stantly losing territory on the Burgundian side and gaining 
 it on the Italian side. Savoy itself only followed the same 
 law by which Vaud and Bresse and Bugey had already 
 passed away from its dukes. We assuredly do not mourn 
 that those dukes no longer reign in Vaud, that they no 
 longer threaten Geneva, and there is no special reason for 
 mourning that they no longer reign over Bresse and Bugey 
 or over the land from which they first sprang. As far as 
 France and Italy are concerned, there is no greater wrong 
 in France annexing Chamb^ry and Annecy than there is in 
 its annexing Aix and Grenoble. We might like to have 
 the Middle Kingdom again ; but, as far as France and Italy 
 are concerned, the absence of a king crowned at Aries, the 
 presence of a power that rules from Paris, is no greater 
 wrong or danger in Savoy than it is in Provence or in the 
 Dauphiny. Only the presence of the power that rules from 
 Paris, whether it calls itself kingdom, empire, or republic, 
 is, when it is fixed at Annecy and Chambery, dangerous in 
 a way in which it is not dangerous when it is fixed only at 
 Aix and Grenoble. The wrong of the transfer of Savoy 
 lay in the danger which it involved to a higher freedom 
 than that of either Rome or Paris. The annexation of that 
 land by France was a grievous wrong to the whole of the 
 Confederate lands, it was a special wrong to those cantons 
 whose very life and breath seems threatened. We may in- 
 deed wish that the Bear had kept his paw in the sixteenth 
 
 D 
 
34 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 century on Chablais and Faucigny as well as on Vaud and 
 Lausanne. His rule might have been for a while a hard one ; 
 the subjects of an oligarchy might possibly sometimes envy 
 the subjects of a duke ; but the rule of Bern might here 
 too have been the schoolmaster to guide its subjects to 
 better things than all. Better than membership of an 
 Italian kingdom, better than membership of a French com- 
 monwealth, better even than membership of a kingdom 
 whose king should wear the crown of Boso, would it have 
 been if the whole land of Savoy, or at the very least its 
 neutral districts, had been promoted to form parts of that 
 free Confederation which is now the worthiest representa- 
 tive of Boso's kingdom. 
 
 And what of the Ligurian Nikaia ? The old Greek town, 
 which had through all ages kept somewhat of a separate 
 being, which had ceased to be, first Greek and then Bur- 
 gundian, but which had never become either French or 
 Italian, might surely have been allowed to live on as a 
 free city, of more account in Europe than the neighbouring 
 principality which was allowed to live. Yet Monaco, 
 Monoikos, the lonely house, which had once been Greek like 
 Nikaia, still keeps its memories as the last outpost of the 
 Western Hellas towards those Italian lands where neither 
 Canaan nor Hellas could find a home. Free Nizza was not to 
 be, and of that it came that the two noblest souls in Europe 
 alike became men without a city, a-nokus avbp€<i, who could 
 free the homes of others, but who could win no freedom for 
 the spots of their own birth. Kanares could deliver Greece ; 
 Garibaldi could deliver Italy ; but Psard — the reward no 
 doubt of its unequalled heroism — was left by the wisdom of 
 Europe in Turkish bondage ; and Nizza, which sent forth 
 the later hero, but which did not, like Psard;, share in his 
 deeds, was doomed to remain no longer a city of the 
 kingdom which its own son had founded. We are drawing 
 nearer to our own times ; many whose memories do not 
 go back to the first career of Garibaldi can well bear in 
 mind the second. The defence of Rome is but a tale 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 35 
 
 written in a chronicle to many to whom the last deliver- 
 ance of the Sicilies is a living thing. Those were days 
 no less stirring than the days of the fii*st outburst twelve 
 years before. Italy again rose for freedom ; but mark the 
 change in the form of freedom for which she rose. Mark 
 what had been wrought by the twelve years' life of one 
 Italian state to which all Italy might look as a sign of what 
 Italy might be. Men no longer looked back to the old 
 local political life of Italy ; they no longer called for a com- 
 monwealth of Rome or a commonwealth of Milan, names 
 which might indeed stir the soul, but which had found 
 it no easy task to keep on their being in a world of 
 big battalions. Every day some stranger duke was cast 
 down from his throne, or some new province fell away 
 from the rule of the native shepherd who, resting on the 
 arms of strangers, had made himself a stranger. But none 
 asked for such isolated forms of freedom as men had sought 
 in 1848. This time sceptred cities might cease to be 
 sceptred withgut feeling chains clank over them. Capitals 
 of independent states could now willingly sink to be mere 
 heads of provinces. The wish on every heart, the vote on 
 every lip, asked for union with the constitutional kingdom 
 of Victor Emmanuel. Every state, every city, joined in 
 the glad procession, save in those lands where the promised 
 deliverer of Italy was able to work his undisputed will. 
 Little had he dreamed what was to come when he enticed 
 one Italian state to his side. He could not leave all in 
 bondage ; he could not by main force thrust his scheme of 
 sham confederation down the throat of the nation that had 
 suddenly sprung to life. But what he could he did. He 
 could still keep the head asunder from the body; when 
 Italy was crying for Rome as her head, he could still keep 
 Rome in his own grasp. And in the north-eastern corner 
 he could hand back to the enemy whom he had overcome 
 half of the lands that he had promised to the ally who 
 fought beside him. Rome, Verona, Venice, were left in 
 bondage. Had the biographer of Csesar gone on so far 
 
36 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 with his studies as to know that the Venetian land was 
 once the Lombard Austria ? I doubt whether I ought even 
 now to reveal the fact, a fact from which some minds 
 might make an inference. I have seen grave arguments 
 on behalf of political evil built up upon yet slenderer 
 grounds^. 
 
 We pass the strait crossed by so many conquerors and 
 deliverers, but which was jiot now crossed by the noblest 
 of all, who came in by another path. In the long tale of 
 Sicily, in the thrilling story of the meeting-place of all 
 the nations, the last of its stirring chapters is the greatest. 
 One older name alone in the long roll-call of the men who 
 have fought for the great island is worthy to be placed 
 alongside of the deliverer of our own times. Pyrrhos and 
 the first Roger came, we may well believe, ready with 
 a honest heart to deliver the Greek from the barbarian, 
 the Christian from the misbeliever. But for their work 
 they must have their reward ; over those whom they 
 deUvered they deemed that they had the right to reign. 
 Timoleon and Garibaldi deemed it enough to deliver ; they 
 worked without reward ; they sought to reign over no man. 
 The foremost man of Italy has followed the foremost man 
 of Greece to his grave of glory; and while the memories of 
 such men are green among us, we need not think scorn 
 of the days in which our own lot is cast. The stock of the 
 men who seem born of a race above their fellows, avhpSiv 
 
 ^ On the " Lombard Austria " I said something in the opening papers of 
 *' Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice." " Austiia" — that is "Oesterreich," 
 " Ea,strice " — is simply the eastern kingdom or part of a kingdom. It thus 
 meant the eastern part both of the Frankish and the Lombard kingdoms, and 
 afterwards that border state of Germany against the Magyar which still keeps 
 the name. The odd thing is that the name seems never to have been used in 
 England, where it would have done perfectly well for East-Anglia. To have 
 argued that Venetia ought to be a possession of the ruler of the present 
 Austria because it was itself once called Austria would have been one degree 
 less foolish than to argue that all Lombardy ought to be Austrian in the 
 modern sense because it had been what an Austrian statesman was pleased 
 to call " a fief of the German empire." See the beginning of the article 
 '* Frederick the First" in Historical Essays, Series I. 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 37 
 
 r]puKi)v 6dov yivos, is not a stock that sends forth its shoots 
 in distant ages only. The banished of Nizza I never saw, 
 but the banished of Psara is to me something more than 
 the hearing of the ear or the reading of the lifeless page. 
 But ten years back, a day never to be forgotten, I stood 
 face to face with one of them who out of weakness were 
 made strong, who waxed valiant in fight, and turned to 
 flight the armies of the aliens. I have seen the hero of 
 the fire-ships in his lowly home looking down upon the 
 ransomed waters. It is something surely for a man to 
 bear in his mind and to tell to those who come after that 
 he has heard the voice and touched the hand of Constantine 
 Kanares. 
 
 But in the years which form our present business the 
 work of Kanares was over ; his honoured age was becoming 
 a memory of the past while the work of Garibaldi was still 
 in-doing. Stand where we will in the circuit of the Golden 
 Shell, by the small remnant of that all-haven where the 
 shipmen of Canaan first cast their anchor and into which 
 Belisarius bore his victorious eagles — stand by the wall 
 where Atihus and Robert Wiscard clave their way into the 
 chosen citadel of Semitic power — stand on the plain where 
 the legions of Metellus bore up against the brunt of the 
 charging elephants — look from the height whence Hamilkar 
 the Thunderbolt looked from his unconquered camp over 
 land and sea — look from the less rugged height which good 
 King William crowned with his glorious minster — stand by 
 the tower whence tolled the Vesper bell that rang the knell 
 of foreign bondage, — from all and every of these spots we 
 may look forth on yet another spot whose tale of our own 
 days ranks beside all, surpasses all, which finds days and 
 spots like itself in the story of Syracuse, but which finds none 
 other such in the story of Palermo. Beyond the bridge 
 of George the Admiral, beyond the pleasure-house of Roger 
 the King, the eye turns to the left to look at that slight 
 sinking in the mountain which marks the pass where the 
 Thousand followed the Deliverer to his work. And think 
 
38 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 of that other day, when that same Deliverer stood face to 
 face with the king for whom he had won two kingdoms, 
 how he laid down the rod of the ruler and the sword of 
 the warrior, and turned aside, greater than honours, greater 
 than crowns, greater even than the applause of a rejoicing 
 world. And yet, we may ask, was not his work too 
 swift, too thorough ? By the throne of Roger, by the tomb 
 of Frederick, by the many-coloured form of the great 
 Admiral, we may be allowed to ask whether such a style 
 as that of King of Sicily should so lightly have passed 
 away from the roll of royal titles. We may be allowed to 
 ask whether the crown of the kings and Csesars who 
 made Sicily the most brilliant realm in Europe could be 
 unworthy to rest on the brow of any ruler of mankind. 
 The crown of Monza, the crown of Palermo, why has not 
 a King of Italy and Sicily taken each in turn in its own 
 home? 
 
 Italy then was free and united, save where the brute 
 force of strangers still held down her head and some of 
 her chief members in bondage. The will of Europe, the 
 wisdom of Europe, had doomed Italy to weakness and 
 disunion ; but the will and wisdom of Europe had to yield. 
 They had to yield also in another land, a land of kindred 
 speech with Italy, a land which, like Italy, the sages of 
 diplomacy had doomed to disunion and dependence, but 
 which we see united and independent in their teeth. 
 Look at the lower course of the Danube and of its great 
 tributaries. There we now see two independent kingdoms, 
 keeping perhaps their independence mainly, as smaller 
 states often must, through the jealousies of their stronger 
 neighbours. They are states whose voice does not count 
 in the mysterious conclave known as Europe, but which at 
 least count with Denmark and Belgium, or even with Spain 
 and Sweden. There is a kingdom of Servia and there is a 
 kingdom of Roumania. When Garibaldi freed the Sicilies, 
 Servia was still a half-free principality with the Turk as 
 its overlord, Roumania was in the transition stage between 
 
IL] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 39 
 
 the estate of two such principalities and that of one. We 
 must not forget the difference between the historical posi- 
 tion of the Servian and the Kouman lands. Servia, at 
 the beginning of the century, was in the full blackness 
 of darkness, an enslaved land, dealt with by the Turk 
 at his good pleasure. By the energy of her sons, by dint 
 of valour and dint of craft, she had risen to the position of 
 a separate state, paying tribute to the Turk, curbed by 
 Turkish garrisons in her capital and a few other towns, 
 but otherwise acting for herself under the rule of a native 
 prince. The Eouman principalities, on the other hand, 
 had never formed part of the Turk's immediate dominion. 
 They had never been in a lower position than that of 
 tributary provinces, whose rulers were named and deposed 
 by the Turk, but never were Turks themselves, while it 
 was a further part of their special relation that no Mussul- 
 man could settle within their borders. Still, though the 
 way in which the state of things had come about in the 
 two lands was different, yet the state of things itself was 
 not widely different ; in both cases there was a people 
 neither wholly free nor yet held in mere bondage, but 
 enjoying enough of freedom to make it earnestly wish 
 for more. But in the two Rouman states the yearning 
 for enlarged freedom took a somewhat different shape from 
 that which it took in Servia. Servia might well long for 
 expansion, that is, for the deliverance of that part of the 
 Servian people which was still in bondage ; she might cast 
 an eye of wonder and envy to her unconquered brethren in 
 Montenegro ; but she could not, like Moldavia or Walachia, 
 long first of all for union with a kindred people placed 
 close beside her in the same political condition as herself. 
 Such was the heart's desire of the two Rouman lands, 
 a yearning which was perhaps the most memorable of all 
 witnesses to that fuller birth of strictly national feelings 
 which marks our age. Germany and Italy were lands 
 which had been split asunder and which longed to be 
 again joined together. But the Rouman principalities 
 
40 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 had been distinct as far back as the darkness of their 
 earlier history enables us to say anything about them. 
 Yet the people of the two lands had a common speech and 
 in many things a common history ; of their skulls I cannot 
 speak, but they found in their common speech and common 
 history grounds enough for deeming themselves a nation, 
 and for deeming that that nation ought to be politically 
 joined together and not parted asunder. 
 
 It is worth while to look with some minuteness at 
 the characteristic way in which the diplomatists dealt with 
 the wishes of the nation which had thus formed itself. 
 Most likely it was sheer incapacity to agree on any definite 
 common purpose, mere swaying backwards and forwards 
 between this proposal and that, the natural state of mind 
 of men who had a dim notion, but only a dim notion, 
 that there are such things as nations, that those nations 
 sometimes have wishes, and that those wishes must some- 
 times be thought of. The two lands craved for union and 
 freedom ; diplomatic wisdom said. Give them a little union, 
 a little freedom, but not too much ; give them just enough 
 to make them wish for more. And, if diplomatic congresses 
 avowedly undertook the duty of teaching nations gradually 
 to walk alone, there might be something to be said for this 
 process. Only when a diplomatic congress has granted to 
 a nation just so much of freedom or union as will infallibly 
 make it ask for more, the next diplomatic congress is 
 always angry, or at least sulky, if the nation does ask 
 for more ; it is yet more angry or sulky, if the nation 
 takes that more without asking for it. Yet experience 
 shows that the bolder policy is often the best ; if a na- 
 tion asks Europe for its rights, it seldom gets them ; if it 
 takes them without asking, Europe will talk and grumble 
 and threaten, but will seldom stretch out its hand to undo 
 what has been actually done. That is, so far as touches 
 the action of nations among themselves ; we have yet to 
 see what will happen whenever the rights of nations are 
 pressed so far as to threaten the interests, perhaps the 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 41 
 
 existence, of a great power. In this Rouman case the people 
 of the two lands were consulted in 1857; the voice of both 
 was for union under a single prince and a single assembly. 
 This was too much for Europe ; the Roumans were told 
 that they must have two princes and two assemblies. But, 
 lest they should forget the object that was denied to them, 
 there was to be a central commission to consider matters 
 of common interest to the two lands, and to suggest pro- 
 posals about them to their two separate assemblies. In 
 1859 the two separate assemblies met, and both, with an 
 unanimous voice, elected the same prince. Europe came 
 together again to see what was to be done with a people 
 who had made up their minds to have only one prince 
 when Europe had told them that they ought to have two. 
 Europe looked at the facts, and thought it wiser to leave 
 the facts alone. That is, the wise men did ungraciously 
 in 1859 what it would have been no more trouble for them 
 to do graciously in 1857. Europe perhaps comforted itself 
 by thinking that the prince was after all two princes ; he was 
 not yet Prince of Roumania ; he was Prince of Moldavia and 
 Prince of Walachia, and held a distinct assembly in each 
 character. But Europe learned that it was better to leave so 
 stiff-necked a people to their own ways. In 1862 the two 
 assemblies became one. In 1866 the two lands avowedly 
 became one ; their separate names passed away from the 
 style of Charles Prince of Roumania. To be sure the style 
 was geographically too wide ; but then so was the style of 
 the King of Italy. As Charles of Roumania is not sovereign 
 of all Roumania, so neither was Victor Emmanuel then, nor 
 is Humbert now, sovereign of all Italy. As there was and 
 is an Italia Irredetita, so there was and is a Roma7iia Irre- 
 denta. Beyond the Carpathians on the one side, beyond 
 the Pruth on the other^ were Rouman lands waiting for their 
 union to the Rouman body, just as Trent and Aquileia ai*e 
 waiting for their union to the Italian body. Still in each 
 case a nation and a state has been formed, and formed in 
 defiance of all the decrees of those who so strangely claim 
 
42 FIFTY YFABS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 to speak in the name of Europe. If all that might be 
 wished for had not been done, then or now, in either case, 
 still not a little had been done then, and — as those who 
 get the inch are apt to take the ell — something more has 
 been done since. 
 
 The Rouman union of 1866 brings us into the thick 
 of the great events of central Europe during the last three- 
 and-twenty years. It may be that the fact that those 
 great events were coming on allowed the Rouman 
 people to shape their own destinies more freely than might 
 otherwise have been granted to them. But if we have 
 reached 1866 on one side of Europe, we must cast an eye 
 on matters two years older on the other side. The long 
 strife about the duchies held by the Danish king came to 
 a strange end, as far as Denmark was concerned, in 1864, to 
 a stranger, as far as the duchies themselves were concerned, 
 in 1866. I remember at the time throwing the events of 
 the former year into the shape of a parable. A long and 
 difficult suit at law is in arguing by skilful counsel on both 
 sides. That there was much to be said on both sides in 
 point of quantity aU the world knows ; that there was 
 much to be said on both sides in point of strength of argu- 
 ment was the one certain conviction which I carried away 
 from my well-meant attempt to master the controversy. 
 Well, the court is sitting ; the counsel are pleading ; in 
 come two powerful personages — giants might be the most 
 respectful name — who break up the pleadings, kick the 
 plaintiff out of court, and knock down the defendant. What- 
 ever side we take in the endless dispute, one thing is 
 plain; if the Danish king had wronged any one, it was 
 the German Confederation as a body, and not two of its 
 individual members, the sovereigns of Brandenburg and 
 Austria. We all know what followed. The hosts of 
 Hohenzollern and Habsburg fought for once side by side 
 against the gallant little realm of Denmark. The disputed 
 duchies, noi*th and south of Eider, were handed over to 
 the conquerors in condominium, much as the little district 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 43 
 
 of Vierlande was then stiU held in condomhiinm — can any 
 one teU me whether it is now? — by the two free cities of 
 Llibeck and Hamburg. Another fate was decreed for the 
 ceded lands in 1866 ; in the intermediate year, in 1865, 
 I saw the white coats at Altona, and strangely out of place 
 they looked. As for the final annexation of those duchies 
 by Prussia in 1 866, one may be allowed to ask whether it 
 was not, to say the least, a somewhat strange way of satis- 
 fying the alleged yearnings of those lands for a separate 
 being, a somewhat strange way of satisfying the claims of 
 the princes who gave themselves out as their lawful rulers. 
 And far beyond this, on the new border of Germany and 
 Denmark, a border so far to the north of the boundary 
 stream of the Great Charles, a great wrong is doing to this 
 day. It might be possible to raise a question as to the 
 strictly German character — if by German we are to under- 
 stand High-Dutch — of any part of the duchy which was 
 once known as Southern Jutland ; but it must be acknow- 
 ledged that its southern part is undoubtedly German in the 
 sense in which the whole of the older English lands are 
 now looked on as German. But the northern pai-t, no man 
 doubts, is as truly Danish as the isle of Zealand itself. If 
 the boundary was to follow the division of language — 
 and it was on behalf of the division of language that the 
 whole dispute largely arose — the boundary should have 
 been drawn, neither at the Eider nor at the boundary of 
 Jutland and Sleswick, but at some point between the two. 
 The distinction was acknowledged. Though aU Sleswick 
 was given up by Denmark, it was promised that the 
 surrender of its northern districts was not to be complete 
 and eternal, but that a few at least of its Danish inha- 
 bitants should some day be allowed to enjoy those rights 
 of nationahty which were so loudly claimed for their 
 German neighbours. That promise has never been fulfilled ; 
 it has even been openly given out that it never will be 
 fulfilled. Here is a wrong which for once is not the doing 
 of what calls itself Europe, but of a single power only. 
 
44 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 And that power is so great, the people wronged is so small, 
 that one wonders at there ever having been a moment's 
 doubt as to granting a boon which could so easily be 
 granted. The Prussian kingdom, the German empire, 
 would assuredly be no weaker, the Danish kingdom would 
 hardly become so strong as to threaten their being or their 
 welfare, if a few thousand people in Northern Sleswick 
 were allowed to enjoy the cherished, the promised, wish 
 of their hearts. Surely that aged Emperor for whose still 
 abiding life we all wish, might, as the last act of an old 
 age which even his enemies must honour, undo this wrong, 
 bestow this gift, a wrong so great to them that endure it, 
 a gift so small to him who has the power to grant it, and 
 so bring his days to an end with a deed of purer glory 
 than to have humbled the pride of France and founded 
 the might of Germany. 
 
 But we have strayed into the record of greater things. 
 The Prussian annexation of Sleswick and Holstein was, 
 as still more of my hearers will remember for themselves 
 than can remember even the second career of Garibaldi, 
 only a small pai-t of changes which did affect the map 
 indeed. The arrangements of 1815 were now swept away 
 in Germany, as they had been already swept away in 
 Italy. United Germany, a Germany taking in all that is 
 German and nothing else, was not made then ; it has not 
 been made now ; without some serious qualifications it 
 never can be made, except by working much more wrong 
 than it would redress. Still in 1866 a great step was 
 taken in the direction of German unity, a step which could 
 not fail to lead to other steps. And that none the less 
 though in form the work of 1866 might pass for a triumph 
 of Fartikularhmns. A Germany from which Austria and its 
 German dependencies were formally shut out, to which 
 Bavaria, Wui-temberg and Baden could hardly be said to 
 belong, might possibly draw on itself the epithet of Klein- 
 deutsch. The very name of a North-German Confederation 
 might seem a falHng back from a Confederation of all 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 45 
 
 Germany. And yet in truth the substitution of the less 
 for the greater was a more marked advance than had ever 
 before been made towards German greatness and German 
 unity. And that again none the less because the advance 
 has taken what at first sight is the unattractive shape of 
 the vast aggrandizement of a single German state. With 
 the time of the Prussian annexation of Sleswick, we have 
 come to the Prussian annexation of Hanover and to the 
 Prussian annexation of a great deal more. Now with nie, 
 and with any who look at history with the same eyes 
 that I do, the extinction of a small state always goes 
 against the grain. There may be a perfectly good reason 
 for the process ; but we ask the reason ; the presumption 
 lies the other way. And when the answer can be given 
 that the thing annexed is neither a free city nor a small 
 nation, but merely some casual and meaningless division 
 of a nation, we must allow that the answer is a good one. 
 North Sleswick lost something by annexation to Prussia ; 
 the free city of Frankfurt lost something by annexation to 
 Prussia ; but it is hard to see what the other annexed states 
 lost. The capitals no doubt lost something in dignity, and 
 something in a more practical way; but it is hard to see 
 what the rest of the country lost. We can understand 
 that the city of Hanover felt in every way lowered by 
 ceasing to be the seat of a king's court. But was anybody 
 at Hildesheim wronged ? The kingdom of Hanover of 
 which it had been made to form a part was after all 
 a patched-up thing answering to nothing either in nature 
 or in history ; there was nothing about it to command any 
 special respect on the part of the towns and districts which 
 had been arbitrarily tacked on to the older electorate. The 
 man of Hildesheim lost nothing by having to look up to 
 one German king instead of to another, to a greater 
 •German king instead of to a smaller. He lost nothing by 
 sending his representative to Berlin instead of sending 
 him to Hanover, except that his representative would have 
 to take a somewhat longer journey. And for that the 
 
46 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 remedy might perhaps have been found in placing the 
 head of Germany more nearly in the midst of Germany, 
 among the old associations of Germany, and not in a city 
 which sprang up yesterday in a Slavonic wilderness. If 
 we look at the Federal constitution either of the North- 
 German Confederation of 1866 or at the German Empire 
 of 1870, simply as a Federal constitution, we are inclined 
 to look on it as a mere p;retence. Even in its latter estate, 
 and still more in its former, the preponderance of a single 
 state is so overwhelming as to destroy all real Federal 
 character. It is the Boeotian Thebes over again. But 
 a Federal system, in its own nature something intermediate 
 between complete separation and complete union, does 
 an useful work when it proves the path to complete 
 union for states which are not as yet ready for complete 
 union. I do not venture to foretell what may be ; I see 
 difficulties, the religious difficulty above all. But I cannot 
 see that there would be any inherent wrong if the German 
 state which is the head and representative of Germany 
 should gradually come to be absolutely the same thing as 
 Germany. That is to say, the name of Prussia would no 
 longer be heard ; the name of Germany would in all things 
 take its place. Bavaria, Austria, the modern Saxony, 
 would pass away into a greater whole, as in other 
 lands Northumberland and Mercia, Anjou and Champagne, 
 have passed away into greater wholes. In this there 
 would be nothing specially to regret ; there is nothing 
 calling for historic reverence about any existing German 
 kingdom or duchy, unless we except that Brunswick 
 whose princes, champions of Germany and Europe, were 
 never degraded into grand dukes or kings.^ Kingdoms and 
 duchies alike have been patched up in modern times out 
 of elements which did command historic reverence. The 
 three free cities alone, survivals and memorials of their 
 whole class, Greek, Italian, and Teutonic, may ask for 
 
 ^ Perhaps something also may be said for Mecklenburg, whose Dukes are 
 the one ancient reigning Slavonic house in Europe. 
 
TL] FIFTY YFARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 47 
 
 tender handling, and may, we trust, receive it under any 
 change. As for the rest, all venerable traditions, all senti- 
 mental associations, were trodden in the dust for ever in 
 1 815 and in times before 18 15. The things which would 
 have to be swept away to make Germany a thoroughly 
 united realm are for the most part innovations whose 
 beginnings the reigning Emperor can remember. 
 
 It is hard to look at the events of 1866, as far as they 
 regarded Germany only, apart from the events of 1870- 
 187 1, of which they were in truth the first stage. But 
 the events of 1866 touched other lands besides Germany, 
 and they touched Germany in one very notable way. If 
 Germany was consolidated and on one side enlarged, it 
 was also on one side cut short. The separation of Bavaria 
 and the other south-western lands was in its own nature 
 only temporary. They needed only the great call of 1870 
 to bring them back. But the separation of Austria and 
 the other German lands of the house of Habsburg has been 
 thus far lasting. It has led to a singular change in ordinary 
 speech. People now talk every day of " Germany and 
 Austria," seemingly without stopping to notice that there is 
 anything remarkable in the phrase. Yet it is a little hke 
 talking about " England and Kent ; " it is exactly like talk- 
 ing about " England and East-Anglia." The phrase to be sure 
 had been used at least once before, in that wonderful treaty 
 of Pressburg, in which a King of Germany and Emperor- 
 elect of the Eomans thought good to describe himself as 
 "Empereur dAUemagne et d'Autriche." But, odd as the 
 phrase sounds, it sets forth a fact. Austria and the lands 
 immediately connected with it have ceased to be German 
 in any formal political sense. That they have so ceased 
 was a stroke of policy indeed, the greatest blow dealt 
 even by the man who, of all living men, is emphatically 
 lieyaXoirpdyixoav^ and surely not wholly KaKo-npayyuav either. 
 It was a grand position, to have the great rival of his 
 power at his feet, and, as far as he was himself concerned, 
 
 1 Xen. Hell. v. 2. 36. 
 
48 FIFTY YFARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 to spare him — to exact the cession of provinces to an ally 
 but to take nothing for himself, but, with all this, to 
 enforce that one surrender which, from the point of view 
 of the conqueror, was more needed than any conquest. 
 In one sense Germany was dismembered, to the political 
 behoof of Prussia, though not to her territorial enlarge- 
 ment. In another sense Germany was strengthened and 
 consolidated by being dismembered, that is by the with- 
 drawal of the only power that could be a rival to her 
 destined, perhaps her chosen, head. Mark too that in 1866 
 an end was put to that state of things on which we com- 
 mented before by which so many sovereigns reigned at 
 once within and without the German border. Of Denmark 
 I have already spoken ; there the German dominions of 
 its sovereign passed away from him, and part of his 
 Scandinavian dominions passed with them. It is really 
 fruitless to go through the whole tale of Luxemburg ; the 
 end is that the duchy abides, no longer part of Germany, 
 but a survival, a very small survival indeed, of the kingdom 
 of the fii'st Lothar. Prussia itself has become a purely 
 German state, so far at least as law and the administration 
 of law can make the men of Posen German and turn the 
 metropolis of Poland into a German city.^ In this new 
 state of things there was no room in the German body 
 for a prince who was only partly German, who besides 
 his endless states within the Confederation, held other 
 endless states beyond it. He must go ; he must give up 
 all place and influence within the German body, and he 
 might reign as he pleased beyond its borders. Bohemia 
 and Austria were now declared to be beyond the German 
 border no less than Hungary and Dalmatia. Never 
 
 ^ It should always be remembered that the result of the three partitions of 
 Poland was that by far the greater part of the original Poland passed to 
 Prussia, a small part to the House of Austria, none to Russia, which took 
 only Lithuanian and old-Russian territory. Prussia took alike the metro- 
 politan city of Gniezno (Gnesen) and the modern capital of Warsaw. The 
 result of the formation of the Duchy of Warsaw and of the Russian Kingdom 
 of Poland has been that Prussia now holds Gneana but not Warsaw. 
 
IL] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 49 
 
 surely was a stroke of policy more successful. An enemy 
 was spared, a rival was got rid of, and the- rival and 
 the enemy has been turned into an ally, into something 
 perhaps more than an ally. An Austrian prince, forming 
 part of the German body, would hardly have been so 
 dutiful to the head of the German body as the Austrian 
 prince, no longer counted as German, has shown himself. 
 
 But the Austrian prince, no longer the head of Germany, 
 no longer held to have any membership with Germany, 
 was touched by the events of 1866 in two other ways. 
 First of all, the victor who refused to enlarge his own 
 borders was ready to enlarge the borders of his ally. At 
 his bidding, another very great step was taken towards 
 the further emancipation of Italy. From Udine to Mantua 
 the land was freed ; the elder Lombard Austria passed 
 away from the ruler of the later German Austria. Yet 
 one may remark that the boundary is strangely drawn ; 
 the power that was cut shoi-t still presses far into the 
 Italian lands ; Verona seems dangerously near to the 
 border of her former master. It is hard to see why the 
 boundary of free Italy should necessarily follow the former 
 boundary of the commonwealth of Venice — why, to mention 
 one land only, Trent and its former bishopric should be left 
 to form part of Italia Irredenta} Is it so to abide % One 
 sometimes has a thought, when we see the houses of Savoy 
 and Habsburg draw so near together, whether the deliver- 
 ance of some part of the Italian lands still kept apart 
 from the Italian body may not be the promised price of 
 the bondage of some greater land east of Hadria. All 
 Servia might be no bad exchange for Trent. And yet against 
 such dangers we have a certain safeguard, though we 
 
 * I commented on this odd bit of political geography when I spoke of the 
 lands themselves in the " Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice.' The 
 Archduke of Austria holds the city of Ti-ieste by a better right than most of 
 his dominions, namely by an ancient commendation of the city itself. The 
 Archdukes have also been Counts of Gorizia for a good while past. But the 
 Austrian possession of the bishopric of Trent is no more venerable than the 
 Austrian possession of Venice, Ragusa, or the sea-board of Istria. 
 
 E 
 
50 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 have to look for it in a strange place indeed. When we 
 look at the south-eastern peninsula at the present moment, we 
 may, if we choose to count ourselves as Trojans, truly say — 
 
 " Via prima salutis, 
 Quod miniine reris, Graia pandetur ab urbe." 
 
 I have in my time said some strong things about the 
 house of Austria and its chief. I may have said stronger 
 things because, both in 1867 and in 1875,1 cherished hopes 
 — you will find their expi'ession in my printed writings ^ — 
 which were not destined to be fulfilled. But I have never 
 said anything which I see the slightest reason to with- 
 draw, because I believe that I have never said anything 
 that was not justified by facts. In 1867 I hoped for more 
 than has happened ; but still something has come of the 
 events of that year. In my former lecture I drew a 
 picture of the head of the Austrian house cast forth from 
 his German and his Magyar capitals, and brought back 
 to his thrones by the loyalty of the Slave and the Rouman. 
 I will not do more than point out the fact that it is not 
 the Slave and the Rouman who brought him back, but the 
 German and the Magyar who cast him forth, who now 
 form the dominant powers in his dominions. From 1867 
 dates the so-called dual monarchy, the union of Hungary 
 and Austria on equal terms, as separate states under a 
 common sovereign. Now be it remembered that I never 
 in my life spoke a word against that union ; the kingdom 
 and the archduchy, as independent states, have an un- 
 doubted right to unite or to separate or to do what they 
 choose, on any terms that they may think good. In 1867 
 the rule of the sovereign of Austria in his Hungarian 
 dominions was changed, by a solemn and speaking rite, 
 from unlawful tyranny to lawful kingship. At that change 
 no man rejoiced more than I. Perhaps I did not see then 
 so well as I do now that the freedom of the Hungarian 
 kingdom did not necessarily mean the freedom of its 
 partes annexce^ that the change which was promotion for 
 
 ^ Historical Essays, First Series, p. 282, first ed. 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 51 
 
 the Magyar was not necessarily promotion for the Eouman 
 and the Slave. But I never doubted the perfect right of 
 kingdom and archduchy to unite on such terms as they 
 might think good ; I never denied the seemingly good 
 success of the arrangement, as between kingdom and arch- 
 duchy. What I have spoken against has been the way 
 in which an arrangement favourable alike to Hungary and 
 Austria has been extended without their consent to lands 
 neither Hungarian nor Austrian. I have claimed aright 
 for Dalmatia, Croatia, and Transsilvania to be thought of as 
 well as Hungary and Austria ; I have wondered that men 
 who were stirred by the bondage and rejoiced in the 
 deliverance of Venice and Milan, have seemingly had no 
 hearts for the bondage of Ragusa, the betrayal of Cattaro, 
 the harrying of Crivoscia, the stealing of paltry Spizza.^ 
 At this moment the ancient kingdom of Bohemia asks 
 that her rights may be regarded as well as those of her 
 Hungarian neighbour, and that the crown of Wenceslaf 
 may be worn in equal honour with the crown of Stephen. 
 But at this moment the independence of the crown of 
 Stephen has become an element of the greatest moment 
 in the south-eastern lands. The Magyar kingdom is doing 
 indirectly what I had once hoped it might do directly. 
 By virtue of the independence won in 1867, it has become 
 in some sort the guardian of the rising nations of South- 
 Eastern Europe. To the Russian, I need not say, the 
 Magyar will never yield an inch ; to the Austrian, he seems 
 a strange schoolmaster, not unlikely to prove a guide into a 
 better path. He has assuredly no mind to set free his own 
 
 * Cattaro, a dependency of Venice, was taken by Austria with other 
 Venetian possessions in 1797. It was taken by France in 1807. In 1813, by 
 combined English, Russian, and Montenegrin efforts, it took its natural 
 position as capital of Montenegro. At the settlement of Vienna England and 
 Russia forsook their ally, and allowed the Austrian to take Cattaro again. 
 The way in which all knowledge of the two Austrian invasions of Crivoscia — 
 the unsuccessful one in 1869, the successful one in 188 1 — was hindered from 
 reaching Western Europe, was one of the greatest triumphs of diplomacy, 
 journalism, or whatever was the agent employed. 
 
 E 3 
 
52 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 Slavonic and Rouman subjects ; but he has learned where 
 his own interests lie in immediate questions, and he has 
 fully made up his mind to hinder his king from leading 
 any more Slaves or Roumans into bondage. 
 
 I am drawing near to the end of my time, and I am as 
 yet only, in strict chronological order, at the year 1867. 
 But on the affairs of South-Eastern Europe, which form so 
 large a part of the events of later years, I have never had 
 any thought of again enlarging now, as I once spoke of 
 them at length in a former lecture. But after 1867 comes 
 1870. At the events of that year, as touching the internal 
 developement of Germany, I have already glanced. The 
 further union of 1870 must have come sometime ; the war 
 with France was its immediate occasion. That war fol- 
 lowed on a time of great diplomatic activity; to a plain 
 man it seems, as I have abeady said, that the ruler of 
 France, having overcome Russia and Austria, thought that 
 the time was come to overcome Prussia also. Only this 
 time he found no confederates ; those in whom he hoped 
 to find confederates fought on the other side ; the Bavarian 
 did as good work for the common fatherland as the Prussian. 
 Then came that mighty fall on which we all gazed with 
 wonder, most of us with rejoicing. The ruler of France 
 found his own dominion pass away as in a moment ; the 
 land which he had led into a needless war was dismem- 
 bered as its fruits. There the map of Europe is changed 
 indeed ; Elsass-Lothringen as the specially Imperial land 
 of the German Emperor — Strassburg again an Imperial city, 
 though shorn of the Reichsfreiheit of which her elders 
 showed themselves unworthy — Metz, once the capital of 
 the German Francia^ turned against its will into a bulwark 
 of Germany against the Latin Francia — ^if we were to stop and 
 argue, Were these changes just? were they wise % it would 
 be very easy to say much from either side. It is enough 
 for me now to point to those changes as being, whether 
 wise and just or not, in any case the greatest of their 
 own kind which our period has seen. It is the one case in 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 53 
 
 which a great power, thoroughly overcome in war by another 
 great power, has been driven to yield, as the price of peace 
 and of more than peace, a land which it had learned to look 
 on as part of its very self. For France to give up Lorraine 
 and Alsace — or the greater part of those two lands — was 
 quite another matter from the House of Austria withdraw- 
 ing from Lombardy and Venice. In one case a family 
 found its estate cut short, and that was all ; in the other 
 case the tenderest feelings of a nation were wounded to 
 the quick. The lands given up by the French people were 
 lands which the French people looked on, and in some 
 ways truly looked on, as having become wholly French ; 
 but the head of the House of Austria himself could hardly 
 have flattered himself that Lombardy and Venice had 
 become Austrian. And the pride of the House of Austria 
 was humoured by the form of the surrender ; the land was 
 at least not directly ceded to the despised Savoyard. No 
 such delicacy was shown when the surrender had to be 
 made by a mere nation and not by a princely house. As 
 ever, the change looks backward and forward ; a long 
 course of past history lies behind it, a long course of future 
 history may well He in front of it. Anyhow we may muse 
 on the instructive contrast. An Italian land is given back 
 to Italy, and it rejoices ; a German land is given back to 
 Germany, and it does not rejoice. It may be that a nation 
 succeeds better in adopting new brethren than a family 
 succeeds in satisfying new subjects; it may be that it is 
 less grievous to lose part of one's mere acres than it is to 
 lose part of one's own body. Far be it for me to say that 
 there is nothing to be said on the German side. When the 
 event was newer, I found a good deal to say on that side 
 myself. I wish now simply to point out the greatness of 
 the change, and its unique character among the changes of 
 our fifty years. 
 
 As usual, the action of France touched other lands 
 besides France. The direct result of the French attack on 
 Germany, the attack in which it was fondly hoped that the 
 
64 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 South of Germany would have fought against the North, 
 was to make Germany get more fully united than she had 
 been made by the war between Prussia and Austria. The 
 chief of Germany true successor of Lewis the East-Frank, 
 of Henry of Saxony, and Kudolf of Habsburg, — true 
 restorer, that is, of the German kingdom, — could hardly, as 
 a King of kings, forbear from taking the loftier style of 
 Charles and Otto. Ther^ have been few more speaking 
 scenes in the history of the world than when the princes 
 and cities of Germany bestowed the crown of Empire on 
 their victorious leader amid the very works and trophies of 
 the maker of Versailles. Then, as in the days of the Great 
 Charles, the strange phrase of an earlier historian became 
 true, and Paris could be spoken of for a moment as a little 
 town of Germany.^ And it is worth while to remember 
 how much the world had changed within the lifetime of 
 one man. Within the lifetime, perhaps within the memory, 
 of the new Augustus, not a few self-styled Empires had 
 risen, not a few had fallen, alike east and west of Ocean. 
 He was, he still is, one of those few still left among men, 
 who can remember when Saxony and Hanover, Bavaria, 
 and Wiirtemberg had not dreamed of kingship, when 
 France and Austria, Mexico and Hajrti, had not dreamed of 
 empire, but when the highest place on earth was still held 
 by a King of Germany and Jerusalem, an elect Emperor of 
 the Romans. 
 
 And, if Germany was touched, within as well as without, 
 so was Italy. It may not be the last step, but it was 
 assuredly the greatest step, in the path of Italian unity, 
 when the head was at last joined to the body, when the 
 army of liberated Italy entered Rome, hard by the path of 
 Alaric, over the battle-field of Pontius of Telesia. How that 
 event looks from its Roman, from its oecumenical, side I have 
 spoken elsewhere.^ To-day we have to look on the re- 
 
 ^ Why Zdsimos called Paris in the days of Julian TroXt'x' 77 t^s Tep/jiavias I 
 never could find out ; but so he did. 
 
 ^ See Chief Periods of European History, p. 194. 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 55 
 
 covery of Rome by Italy as giving the world the sight of 
 such an Italy as has not been since the days of Theodoric, 
 since those thirty years of peace and happiness when the 
 "humanity" of the Roman was so well guarded by the 
 " savagery " of the Goth. Yet here too are difficulties and 
 dangers. Never before in the whole range of history, never 
 in the long strife of Popes and Emperors, were the temporal 
 and spiritual powers brought into such close neighbour- 
 hood, forced into such immediate rivalry. Since the king- 
 ship of Italy has sat on the Quirinal, with the primacy of 
 the West, in so many eyes the primacy of the world, still 
 sitting on the Vatican, the two swords could not fail to be 
 eager at any moment to leap from their scabbards. In this 
 matter our age has indeed seen a new thing, a thing of 
 which much may have to be written in the pages of future 
 history. 
 
 But we cannot part from the unity of Italy without once 
 more casting a glance at it in that aspect which makes it 
 one of the most characteristic, as well as one of the happiest, 
 events of our time. In Italy, as elsewhere, the nations rise, 
 the nations speak, and the so-called decrees of Europe pass 
 away. In the whole history of political language it would 
 be hard to find a stranger use of a word than that use of 
 the word " Europe " to which we have been for some years 
 past daily accustomed. " Europe," the " wiU of Europe," the 
 " mandate of Europe," the " concert of Europe," are phrases 
 which have been of late in every mouth. What do they 
 mean ? Certainly not an agreement among the nations of 
 Europe, not even an agreement among the princes of 
 Europe. What " Europe " means in these now every-day 
 phrases is simply six powers — five nations and a family — 
 who have received no commission to act in the name of 
 their fellows, but who speak and act as if they were so 
 commissioned, who expect their will to be obeyed, simply 
 because they have the physical strength to make men obey 
 it. The new constitution of Europe— for as an avowed 
 
56 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. [Lect. 
 
 constitution, claiming respect for its acts, it is a new con- 
 stitution — would seem very strange to a statesman of the 
 seventeenth century. Such an one would perhaps be 
 puzzled by the appearance of Russia as a great power ; he 
 would certainly be puzzled at the appearance of Italy as a 
 great power ; he would be most of all puzzled to find out 
 what could be meant by Austria appearing as a power 
 distinct from Germany. It would seem to him a strange 
 Europe from which Spain and Sweden at their several ends 
 seem to be shut out, and in which the mind of the Seven 
 Provinces of the United Netherlands is held to be not worth 
 the asking. In this matter 1878 had really fallen back 
 below the level of 1815. The names of several powers 
 were set to the earlier settlement which were not set to the 
 later one. Still no man can doubt that the disposition of 
 physical force in Europe at the present moment is well re- 
 presented in the constitution of the body which those to 
 whom the history of old Hellas is a blank think it fine to call 
 the " European Ai-eopagus." ^ If the six powers agree to do 
 a thing, they clearly have brute force enough to do it. The 
 question is whether their physical strength is accompanied 
 by any moral force. The despots and diplomatists themselves 
 seem sometimes really to think, not only, what is true 
 enough, that they have the power to make others obey 
 them, but that others are in some way morally bound to 
 obey them. They seem to think that their signature to a 
 document binds, by some legal force, those who have never 
 signed it or been consulted about it. They seem to think 
 that their decrees have that same kind of force of law over 
 powers and nations which have not consented to them 
 which the decrees of the lawful assembly of any kingdom 
 
 ^ This very common phrase is one of the queerest of popular confusions. It 
 is hard indeed to see the analogy between a meeting of envoys from several 
 states and the highest criminal court in a particular state. Would anybody 
 say that the Berlin Treaty was made by the " King's Bench of Europe " ? 
 There seems to be a twofold blunder at work. First, the Athenian Areiopagos 
 is confounded with the Amphiktyonic Council ; secondly, the nature of the 
 Ampliiktyonic Council is altogether misconceived. 
 
II.] FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 57 
 
 or commonwealth have over the subjects or citizens of that 
 kingdom or commonwealth. A most remarkable case was 
 the cry which went through all lands, a cry rising some- 
 times from very illustrious lips, when two of the three 
 severed parts of Bulgaria decreed and accomplished their 
 union. It was said, quite seriously, that the Bulgarians had 
 broken the treaty of Berlin. Yet that phrase was a contra- 
 diction on the face of it. The Bulgarians could not break a 
 treaty which they had never signed, about which their 
 wishes had never been in any way consulted. What was 
 the simple state of the case ? Bulgaria, longing for freedom 
 and unity, in the actual, if only momentary, possession of 
 freedom and unity, was, by the deepest wisdom of Europe, 
 condemned to division, part of it to something worse than 
 division. One-third of the liberated Bulgarian people was 
 not only parted from its fellows, but was thrust down again 
 into the very blackness of darkness. Such was the will of 
 Europe, and to that will the despots and diplomatists held 
 that the Bulgarian people owed the same kind of respect 
 which they owe to an act passed by a Bulgarian parliament. 
 Two of the severed lands presently showed themselves wiser 
 than Europe, and came together again in the teeth of Europe. 
 In so doing they broke no law, they broke no treaty, they 
 sinned against no moral obligation of any kind. And what 
 followed? Europe was sulky for a while; this and that 
 despot or diplomatist grumbled ; but Europe soon thought 
 it wiser to accept facts to a certain extent. Whatever 
 comes, there is little fear of the exact state of things de- 
 signed by the Treaty of Berlin being again forced on the 
 Bulgarian people. That is to say, a nation firm in asserting 
 its rights has proved itself wiser than Europe, in a sense 
 stronger than Europe, for it has won Europe over to its 
 side. So it ever is ; truth and right have after all some 
 power in the world ; there is still some shame left among 
 the rulers of men which keeps them from pushing simple 
 brute force to an extreme point. Now and then, more 
 commonly than fifty years back, they do seem to feel 
 
58 FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY, 
 
 that the commands of a narrow oligarchy, acting without 
 any commission but its own will, can have no moral force 
 over those who have never consented to obey them. This is 
 the point to be fully understood. The " will of Europe," in 
 this new and strange sense of the word " Europe," is indeed 
 a power of overwhelming might ; it is a power to which it 
 is often wise to yield ; but it should be understood all round 
 that to yield to it is simply a question of prudence, that its 
 bidding has no strength of law over men and nations who 
 have given its authors no commission to act in their names. 
 That doctrine grows, if but slowly ; over and over again 
 within our fifty years have we seen the wisdom and the 
 will of " Europe " give way to the higher wisdom, the 
 stronger will, of the nations for whom " Europe " sought to 
 lay down the law. We need not despair of hearing the 
 word some day formally go forth that the nations are to be 
 free to act for themselves, as the word went foi-th not so 
 long ago that Europe was to do everything for or against 
 them, and that they were not to lift a hand or speak a word 
 in their own cause. Truly our fifty years have been on the 
 whole fifty years of advance for the cause of right and free- 
 dom. Look on this picture and on that. Look at the map 
 of 1837 and on the map of 1887. Much truly has been 
 changed for the better ; but there is still something left for 
 coming years to change. 
 
TEUTONIC GOKQUEST IN GAUL 
 AND BEITAIN. 
 
 TWO LECTUEES. 
 
LECTUEE I. 
 
 (November 24, 1887.) 
 
 In the present lecture I shall be compelled to speak 
 much of myself and to make quotations from my own 
 writings. That such necessity is laid upon me is my 
 misfortune and not my fault. Ever since I was placed 
 in this chair, I have put it before me as one of my main 
 objects in it to do what I could to set forth true views of 
 the earliest history of our own people in our own land. 
 But, in order the better so to do, it was my purpose to 
 reach our own land by a somewhat round-about path. I 
 have long held that the only sure way to understand the 
 true character of Teutonic settlement in Britain was 
 to compare and contrast it with Teutonic settlement in 
 Gaul. I did my best to draw this contrast many years 
 ago in some lectures which were at the time printed in 
 Macmillan's Magazine. In this country they never got 
 beyond the stage of papers printed in Macmillan's Maga- 
 zine ; ^ but some of my American friends were good enough, 
 of their own accord, to reprint them in the shape of a 
 little book. It is possible therefore that some people in 
 America may remember them, while I cannot be so bold 
 as to think that anybody in this island does. My object 
 in those papers was to set forth the distinction between 
 two forms of conquest. In one of them an invading 
 people settles in a conquered land, and no doubt causes 
 by its settlement no small amount of change, no small 
 amount of suffering. But the main fabric of society 
 in the conquered land lives on. The language of the 
 conquered people lives on ; the conquerors adopt it, first 
 
 ^ " The Origin of the English Nation," Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xxi. pp. 
 415? 509 > 3:xii- 31; "The Alleged Permanence of Roman Civilization in 
 Britain," vol. xxii. p. 31. 
 
G2 
 
 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 alongside of, and then instead of, their own tongue. The 
 religion of the conquered lives on ; the conquerors adopt 
 it in the first moment of their conquest. The institu- 
 tions of the conquered live on ; they are largely modi- 
 fied ; new institutions arise beside them ; but the old are 
 not swept away. The conquered people live on in their 
 own land; they are neither slaughtered nor driven out 
 nor enslaved ; they remain freemen and landowners ; not 
 a few of them are admitted to the favour of the foreign 
 king and hold the highest offices under him. From one 
 side of the picture indeed one is tempted to doubt whether 
 conquest, in any sense beyond its strict legal meaning, is 
 not too harsh a word for such a process. Such a con- 
 quest was that wrought by the Franks in Gaul at the 
 end of the fifth century. There is another side to that 
 great event, a careful grasp of which is needful for its full 
 historic understanding; but for our present purpose the 
 side on which I am dwelling is the only one that concerns 
 us. I need not go about to prove to any one here that 
 the Latin tongue once spoken in Gaul has never died out, 
 that it has never been displaced by any other. It has 
 changed, by the operation of the causes which affect all 
 languages, till we look on modern French as a different 
 tongue from old Latin ; but there is no break in what we 
 may call the personal identity of the language. The Gaul 
 had cast away his own speeci^and. had taken to himself the 
 speech of his Koman conqueror. The Roman of Gaul — 
 that is, the Gaul in his Roman garb — never cast aside 
 his Roman speech, and never took to himself the speech 
 of his Frankish conqueror. The cities of Gaul lived on 
 through the Frankish conquest ; they and their districts 
 still keep the names of the old Gaulish tribes ; it would 
 be hard indeed to find a Frankish name of city or district 
 alongside of abiding Arelate and Burdigala, of the land 
 of the Andecavi and the land of the Arverni. The map of 
 Gaul under Augustus remains for many purposes the map 
 of France as it is this day ; down to the great French 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. G3 
 
 revolution the two were largely the same thing. And 
 above all, the faith of the land has never changed, or has 
 changed only in a far later day. In the cities of Gaul the 
 succession of their bishops was never broken ; the worship 
 of which those bishops were the ministers never ceased, 
 save for a moment in a time that seems as yesterday. On 
 the hill of Angers, in the isle of Paris, the gods of the Gaul 
 and the Koman gave way to Christ and His Mother ; but 
 Christ and His Mother never gave way to Woden and 
 Thunder. In a word, the heathen Teuton burst into a Roman 
 and Christian land; but the land remained Roman and 
 Christian. The change was in the conqueror. The 
 Sicamber learned to burn what he had worshipped and to 
 worship what he had burned. And, to crown the whole, 
 the tale of the conquest is set down in books written not 
 long after the conquest. . We know the actors, we know 
 the dates. And the men of two generations later we know 
 better than the men of almost any other time. There are 
 few characters in history with whom we feel so thoroughly 
 at home as Gregory of Tours has taught us to feel with 
 King Chilperic and King Guntchramn. 
 
 There are moments in which we wish that we could feel 
 in the same way at home with our own Ceawlin and our 
 own Ida. We are tempted to mourn that, while in the 
 history of the Frank the sixth century of our sera is, at 
 least from the picturesque and personal side, an age of 
 unrivaUed light, in the history of the Angle and the 
 Saxon it is the very blackness of darkness. But that so 
 it is^. is the penalty of being Englishmen ; it is part of the 
 price that we pay for cleaving to the tongue, the laws, 
 the whole historic being, of our earliest forefathers, instead 
 of casting them away, or mingling them with those of 
 another folk. That we have to grope and guess to find 
 out what manner of men our fathers were, instead of 
 gazing on their living shapes painted for us by the pencil 
 of a Gregory, is the surest of all signs that our fathers 
 stood in quite another case towards the land which 
 
64 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 they conquered and towards its elder folk from that in 
 which their fellow-conquerors in Gaul stood towards the 
 land and the folk among which they had made their way. 
 I remember well that in the forgotten papers of which I 
 spoke I risked a daring paradox. I said that it was by 
 the light of our darkness, by the teaching of our ignorance, 
 ^that we gained such knowledge as we have of the early days 
 of our settlement in the land in which we dwell. And so it 
 is ; the greatest of all facts, the most instructive of all 
 facts, in our earliest history is that our knowledge of it is 
 so slight, that we are sometimes tempted to say that we 
 have no knowledge of it whatever. Had the nature of 
 our settlement been other than it was, had it had ought 
 in common with the settlement of the Goth, the Burgun- 
 dian, and the Frank, such darkness could not have been. 
 We might not have had a Gregory ; few lands in any age 
 have had any one who could tell a tale and paint a picture 
 as he could tell and paint it. But, if we had not a 
 Gregory, we might at least have had a Prosper, an Idatius, 
 or a Fredegar. We had our Bseda in course of time ; 
 had our settlement been as the settlement of the Frank, 
 we should have had our Bseda long before. Or rather we 
 should not have had our Bseda, but another folk would 
 have had him. A Bseda recording the events and painting 
 the men of Britain in the sixth century would have been 
 a Bseda speaking — I still venture to think Welsh, but, 
 if any one pleases, let it be Latin. He would have been 
 one speaking either Welsh or Latin as his mother tongue ; 
 he would assuredly not have been one like ourselves, 
 speaking our own tongue in which we were born, and 
 writing Latin only as we write it now, as a tongue which 
 the rod of the schoolmaster has beaten into us. 
 ^ Here then is the great fact of all. The man of France 
 still speaks the tongue which the Gaul learned from the 
 Roman, with the changes which could not fail to come 
 about in fourteen hundred years, with some special changes 
 directly owing to the coming of his Frankish conqueror. 
 
L] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 65 
 
 He speaks the tongue of the conquered, with a certain 
 infusion from the tongue of the conqueror. The man of 
 England still speaks the tongue which he learned of no 
 man, the tongue which his fathers brought with them from 
 their elder home ; he speaks it with the changes which 
 could not fail to come about in fourteen hundred years ; 
 he speaks it with special changes owing to far later events 
 with which we have not now to deal. But the changes 
 which were directly caused by his settlement in the con- 
 quered land are so slight as to be hardly marked. That is, 
 he speaks the tongue of the conqueror, with an infusion 
 from the tongue of the conquered so slight that it needs 
 a delicate ear indeed to detect its ring. And if we 
 cast our eye over the land, its map, its history, we find 
 that the case of Gaul is reversed in all other points no 
 less than in the point of language. Here and there an 
 ancient city keeps or seems to keep its Roman name ; in 
 some cases at least it would be truer to say that it keeps 
 the name by which our fathers marked the fact that the 
 Roman city had once stood there. Gaul can hardly show a 
 parallel to Anderida standing empty after fourteen hundred 
 years ; it can show no parallel to Deva springing again to 
 life after its shorter desolation of three hundred. But the 
 more part of the chief cities and boroughs of England, \| 
 heads of shires, heads of dioceses, bear names which have 
 no sign of the Roman about them, names which were as 
 clearly given by the Angle and the Saxon in his settle- 
 ment in Britain as are the names, often kindred, which 
 later Angles and Saxons have given to their dwellings in 
 America and Australia. And as here and there an imme- 
 morial city still keeps its site and name, so here and there 
 an immemorial district still keeps its name and boundaries. 
 Kent, like Connecticut, keeps on a name older than the 
 day when the English speech was first heard within its 
 borders. But Kent and Connecticut are names which are 
 a good deal outnumbered by names which the English 
 settler gave of his own devising. Here and there, in the 
 
66 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 lands of later conquest, a tribe like the Damnonii may 
 keep their name and the name of their land with a slight 
 change in the new tongue, but where in Teutonic Britain 
 are they who should answer to the Turones, the Parisii, 
 the Remi ? They have given way to the Snotingas and 
 the Bockingas, the Hwiccas and the Magessetan, to the 
 men who called one famous spot because there was a 
 bridge there over Grant -or Cam, to the men who at an 
 earlier stage called another famous spot because at that 
 point the oxen found a ford. The map of the England 
 of Domesday is, with the smallest exceptions, the map of 
 pur living England ; but the map of the England of Domes- 
 day keeps hardly a trace of the map of the Britain of 
 Cassivelaunus or of Claudius. And above all, where among 
 the prelacy of England is he who can claim for his bishop- 
 stool the same unbroken life from the earliest days of the 
 Christian faith as the life which has dwelled on without 
 a gap in the church of the Primate of all the Gauls and 
 the church of the Primate of Primates,^ in the home of 
 Sidonius and Gallus on the hill of Auvergne, in the home 
 of Martin and Gregory by the rushing stream of Loire ? 
 Beside them what we deem antiquity, the foundation of 
 Eadwine, the foundation of iEthelberht, seem things of 
 yesterda}^ indeed. While the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul 
 were pressing to receive the waters of baptism, while they 
 were rearing new temples for the faith of Christ and 
 pouring fresh gifts into the treasures of his ministers, the 
 Teutonic conquerors of Britain were breaking down the 
 ^oly places ; they were slaying the priest before the altar ; 
 they were setting up the worship of their own Teutonic 
 gods in the meadow that took the name of Thundersley, 
 on the height that took the name of Wodnesbeorh. Never 
 
 ' This proud title was borne by the Archbishops of Vienne, rivals of the 
 Archbishops of Lyons, Primates of all the Gauls. The title seems to confute 
 itself, being evidently taken up as a point in the controversy. Accordingly 
 the Primate of all the Gauls is still Primate of all the Gauls, while the Primate 
 of Primates has ceased to be, and his metropolitan church is now only 
 parochial. 
 
I] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 67 
 
 in the whole history of the world can we fmd a sharper 
 contrast, a contrast more clearly marked in every detail, 
 than that which parts Teutonic conquest as it was wrought 
 by Wallia, by Guntochar, and by Chlodowig, from Teutonic 
 conquest as it was wrought by Hengest and Cerdic and 
 Ida Bearer of Fire. 
 
 Of the causes of this great difference I am not this 
 day called on to speak a word. I have often spoken of 
 them before ; I may often have to speak of them again ; 
 but to-day I have to speak only of the difference itself 
 and its results. Now I take for granted that no one will 
 deny the simple facts which I have just stated. There are 
 indeed some with whom one cannot argue ; one cannot 
 argue with an Anglo-Israelite, as one cannot argue with 
 a man who says, with far better grounds for his belief, 
 that the earth is flat. Nor can I at least undertake to 
 argue with one ingenious gentleman — I know his name 
 and place of abode — who has proved satisfactorily that 
 every word of our spoken English has a clear Cymric 
 root, that the king, the alderman, and the sheriff, are not 
 the king, the alderman, and the sheriff, but something 
 quite different in the British tongue. To be sure, it 
 weakens his case a little that Celtic scholars say that his 
 ancient Welsh, when it means anything at all in any 
 language, is most commonly modern Irish. Still I should 
 like to see that ingenious gentleman try his hand on the 
 spoken speech of France. French by its very name must 
 be the speech of Franks, not the speech of Latins; and 
 he could doubtless show with ease that the present French 
 of Paris is the purest High-German. There are those 
 too who tell us that the laws and customs of England are 
 after all only the laws and customs of Rome ; they would 
 teach us that the dooms of iEthelberht are nothing but 
 a feeble echo, perhaps a blundering crib, of this lex passed 
 in the comitia in the year of such and such consuls, of 
 that rescript sent forth for the enlightenment of enquirers 
 by such and such an Emperor in such a year of his 
 
 F 2, 
 
68 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 tribunitian power. Some of this sect have risen to greater 
 consideration among men than their brethren who have 
 tried their skill on language ; some day I may even have 
 to argue with them ; but not to-day. But I appeal to all 
 who have the smallest accurate knowledge of the events 
 of Gaul and Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, the 
 many recorded events of Gaul, the few recorded events 
 of Britain, whether the 'general contrast that I have 
 drawn is not in its broad features a true one. And I 
 appeal to them further when I draw the most obvious in- 
 ferences from the recorded facts of history, from the present 
 facts which we see around us. Here is a people who 
 speak a Teutonic tongue, a people who speak of God 
 and ma7i^ oi father and mother^ of earth and heaven. There 
 is a people who speak a Latin tongue, a people who speak 
 of Bitii and hojume, of joere and mere, of terre and ciel. Here 
 is a people from whose lands the outward signs of Roman 
 occupation have been well nigh swept away. There is 
 a people in whose land those signs meet us at every step. 
 Here is a people in whose land the faith of Christ gave 
 wa}^ for a while to the faith of Woden. There is a people 
 among whom the whole fabric of the Christian Church, 
 like the rest of the fabric of Roman society, went on 
 unbroken. And yet we know that both lands, at nearly 
 the same time, fell under the power of Teutonic con- 
 querors. Am 1 not justified in inferring that Teutonic 
 conquest meant wholly different things in the two cases ? 
 Do not the plainest facts that we see around us, the every 
 day words of our common speech, the most familiar of 
 names and customs, tell us, as the simplest and most 
 obvious of truths, that Teutonic conquest in Gaul, the 
 conquest of the Frank, much more the conquest of the 
 Goth and the Burgundian, was a conquest which simply 
 modified an existing state of things and left its essence 
 unchanged, while Teutonic conquest in Britain, the con- 
 quest of the Jute, the Angle, and the Saxon, was a conquest 
 which wholly swept away an existing state of things,! 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 69 
 
 and set up another in its place. In the Teutonic Conquest 
 of Britain something happened which did not happen in 
 the Teutonic Conquest of Gaul, something for which we 
 must find a name. That is to say, Teutonic conquest in / 
 
 Gaul did not involve the displacement of one people by /(^ 
 another, while Teutonic conquest in Britain did. 
 
 ' Displacement of one people by another.' In those 
 words we have indeed touched the root of the matter. 
 But on that root of the matter I had not designed to 
 touch from this chair for some while to come. I had 
 hoped some day to reach the great question which I must, 
 for the thousandth time, put in the old familiar shape, 
 because I can put it in no better, whether we, the English 
 people, are ourselves or somebody else. But I had hoped 
 to reach that question by that very roundabout path which 
 I have pointed out ever since I began my work in this 
 place, which I pointed out again in the preface to my 
 last published volume.^ If there is any one here who has 
 not yet read the preface to my Chief Periods of European 
 History, — and it is always wisest to assume that nobody 
 has read a thing, especially if it is of one's own writing, 
 —I would ask him to read it the first thing after he 
 goes home. From that reading he will better under- 
 stand my position this day; he will see how late discus- 
 sions have forced me into a question which I had wished 
 not to touch till I had gone through all the earlier stages 
 which are needful for its true understanding. I had not 
 designed to speak of Britain till I had done with Gaul; 
 I had not designed to show what manner of men we were 
 ourselves till I had fully painted our neighbours to com- 
 pare with us. The work has been slow; it is a long 
 business in itself; it has been broken in upon, as some of 
 you know, by causes not of my own choosing. Still 
 a faithful few have followed me through all lands and 
 all ages whither I have had to lead them. To them, 
 both in the closet and on the house-top, I have tried to 
 
 ^ Chief Periods of European History, p. viii. 
 
70 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 show in all fulness what the Frank in Gaul was, that they 
 might the better understand, when the time should come, 
 how different a being the Angle or the Saxon in Britain 
 was from him. The strange eagerness, unparalleled on the 
 part of any other nation, with which so many Englishmen 
 strive to turn their backs on themselves and to proclaim 
 themselves anything but what they are — the astounding 
 state of mind in which an educated man can talk with scorn 
 of " the savagery of Anglo-Saxons^"^ as of people with whom 
 he himself has nothing to do — all this is largely the result 
 of blundering traditions and a confused nomenclature ; 
 when it springs from any more pardonable cause, it comes 
 from looking at the Teutonic settlement in Britain by 
 itself, and not as part of the great Wandering of the 
 Nations. Looked at in this last point of view, we see 
 how different a shape was taken by our share in that 
 great movement from the share taken by our kinsfolk on 
 the mainland. When we see how Teutonic invasion 
 worked in those lands in which it really was no more 
 than some tell us that it was in Britain, then, and not till 
 then, shall we see how different a thing it really was in 
 Britain. Such then was the path which I had chalked out, 
 a path which I had hoped to plod along steadily and in 
 peace. But it hardly does to wait in this way, it may 
 be for years and it may be for ever, under the present 
 circumstances of the case. We have long been told very 
 loudly in many quarters that the so-called "Teutonic 
 theory " of early English history, the theory, I would 
 again say, that we are ourselves and not somebody else,^ 
 is altogether worn out, that it is a thing dead and gone, 
 an old wives' fable, to which only a few such survivals 
 and fossils as your Regius Professor would think of 
 
 ' I got this curious phrase from a local pamphlet, in which " the savagery of 
 Goths and Anglo-Saxons" is contrasted with the "humanity of Greeks and 
 Romans." The state of mind which is revealed by such a way of speaking 
 is really worth a few moments' thought. It is to be hoped that its author 
 is provided with a pedigree of his own entitling him to the wearing of 
 a golden rirTi^. 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 71 
 
 cleaving. Late discussions have made this cry rise louder 
 than ever. We are told that the judgement of science^ the 
 witness of science, is against us. The witness of speech, 
 a thing that may change, must yield to the witness of the 
 skull that cannot change.^ Our own heads bewray us, 
 telling all mankind that we are somebody else and not 
 ourselves. An eminent man of science, who, when he 
 chooses, can deal very well with history also, is held to 
 have settled everything by saying that the doctrine that 
 "the English nation is almost wholly Teutonic" is a "base- 
 less notion." ^ Against such a sentence as this, I could only 
 put in a feeble appeal in arrest of judgement. I could only 
 ask that we might be allowed to wait till we had more fully 
 defined the word "English," the word " Teutonic," and the 
 qualifying word " almost." 
 
 In this controversy, as in all others, the first thing is 
 that each side should know what it means itself and what 
 the other side means. I believe that, if this rule were 
 always followed, there would be much fewer controversies 
 than there are. Now I who speak to you am always 
 talked about as the strongest supporter — some, I believe, 
 call me the inventor — of this supposed " Teutonic theory ; " 
 yet I believe that, if we really came to understand one 
 another, there would be found to be little or no difference 
 as to facts between me and the eminent man of science 
 who speaks so scornfully of all Teutonic theories. He and 
 I are looking at the matter from two wholly different 
 points of view ; we speak two different languages ; the 
 points that he wishes to establish are of very little import- 
 ance to me, and the points that I wish to establish are of 
 very little importance to him. Let me try an illustration 
 of our several positions. Who, I would ask you, was the 
 father of the first Augustus ? A Roman lawyer would 
 have answered that the divine Augustus was the son of the 
 
 * See the Address of Mr, Sayce to the Anthropological Section of the British 
 Association at Manchester^ Oct. 1887. I shall come more fully to this in 
 my second lecture. 
 
 ^ See Mr. Huxley's letter in the Times, Oct. 12, 1887. 
 
72 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 divine Julius. A Roman physician must have answered 
 that Gaius Octavius, by adoption Csesar, was the son of 
 another Gaius Octavius, of no very great renown. If either 
 had charged the other with error and had gone about to 
 convince him, they might have argued for ever. The 
 lawyer and the physician had no dispute as to matters of 
 fact ; but they spoke different languages, and looked at 
 things from different points of view. In the one word 
 adojot'wn lies the key to the whole matter. A very im- 
 portant word it is in the history both of persons and of 
 nations. It enables us to say that, while, as a truth of 
 natural science, there is no manner of doubt that the 
 younger Gaius Octavius was the son of the elder, yet, as 
 a matter of law, and as a matter of history too, it is far 
 truer to say that he was the son of the great Dictator. 
 That one Gaius Octavius was by natural birth the son of 
 another was a matter of no importance whatever beyond 
 the bounds of the ge^is Octavia ; that the divine Augustus 
 was, in the eye of the law of Rome, the son of the divine 
 Julius is a fact which has influenced the history of the 
 world perhaps more than any one secular event sinfee the 
 first calling of the Roman city into being. I know not 
 whether there was any difference between the skulls and 
 the hair of the Octavii and the Julii. It was perhaps 
 no more than becoming that the plebeians of Velitrse 
 should difier in some physical respect from the patrician 
 children of Aphrodite and Anchises. Only, if so, the 
 divine Augustus, once Octavius, with his Octavian skull 
 and Octavian hair, was none the less, for my purpose, for 
 the purposes of history, for all the later destinies of the 
 w^orld, as true a Julius as if the divine ichor from Mount 
 Ida had physically flowed in his veins. ^ 
 
 Herein is a parable of the nations. I must again refer 
 to myself. Has anybody read the Essay on Race and 
 
 ^ Of course some drops of it must have come to him through Julia, mother 
 of his mother Alia, and that so it was was doubtless the reason of his adop- 
 tion. But the succession of a Roman gens took no heed to female descent, 
 and an adoption was just as good in the case of an utter stranger. 
 
I.] IN GA UL AND BRITAIN. 73 
 
 Language in the third series of my Historical Essays?^ 
 It is very stiff reading ; so perhaps nobody has. Nobody 
 at least here ; for again my American friends have printed 
 it in a little book ; so I suppose some of them have 
 read it. And here in Oxford some days back I knew 
 of one man who had read it ; but he has since started 
 for the land, I believe, of Caphtor and Chittim. Well, 
 I will tell you some of its contents, which may perhaps 
 amaze any one who knows my views only by what 
 clever writers in the newspapers think good arbitrarily 
 to assume my views to be. In that essay I strive at some 
 length to show that no man now living can be certain that 
 he springs in the male line, that no man not the descendant 
 of a king can be certain that he springs in the female line, 
 from any of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who landed in 
 Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. And I strive 
 further to show that it is impossible to prove that any of 
 those Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came of the physical stock 
 of the first Aryans who set forth from the East — it was the 
 East then, and, if it is now the proper thing to say the 
 North, it makes not the slightest difference to my argument. 
 Nay more, I strive further to show that there is nothing to 
 prove that these same first Aryans were in any way of 
 kindred blood to one another ; I suggest that they may, for 
 ought we can tell, have been a mere accidental company of 
 fellow-travellers. That is what I have really written, what 
 I wrote more than ten years ago. Now I cannot help 
 thinking that some even here present may be a little 
 surprised to hear that I have written that. Yet there too 
 that what I have written is printed in more than one book ; 
 anj^ one who likes can go and read it. And it has, I must 
 think, a fairly scientific sound. I think that, after saying 
 that, I need not feel disturbed if my own skull should be 
 proved to be of the strictest Iberian type, or if it can be 
 proved that the skulls of Cerdic and Cissa were of alto- 
 gether different shapes from mine and from one another. 
 
 ^ Historical Essays, Third Series, p. 173. 
 
74 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 Be it so ; from my point of view, Cerdic and Cissa and I 
 myself will remain Englishmen all the same, English at 
 least in that practical historic sense in which the divine 
 Augustus was a Caesar. 
 
 It is, I think, no more than is reasonable that I, or any 
 other man, should be judged by what he himself has said 
 and written, not by what somebody else may have said or 
 written, still less by what- somebody, some very clever 
 man of course, may choose to say in the newspapers that 
 either I or the other man has written. Now I see con- 
 stantly put into my own mouth very strange things, things 
 which I am sure that I never wrote or said or thought. 
 Has none of you heard of me as one who holds that we 
 English are all of us of unmixed Teutonic blood — whatever 
 Teutonic blood may be — and that our forefathers in the fifth 
 and sixth centuries slew or drove out every single Briton, 
 perhaps not within the four seas of the island, but at least 
 within that part of the island which has for many ages 
 been known as England? Listen then on the other hand, 
 if only for a moment or two, to what I have really said on 
 this matter. In the second chapter of my History of the 
 Norman Conquest ^ I touched briefly on the subject on which 
 I have already said something to-day and which I hope 
 some day to treat far more fully, the diflerence in the 
 nature of Teutonic conquest in Britain and in Gaul. I will 
 read you a few sentences which bear directly on this 
 matter of the rooting out of the Britons. In that chapter 
 I say; 
 
 " Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossihility , there is every 
 reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which 
 had hecome English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly ex- 
 tirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be often spared; 
 but, as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigra- 
 tion, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished 
 found at the hands of our fathers," 
 
 Here is a statement for which I am really answerable, 
 and I think it is very different from the statements which 
 
 ^ Norman Conquest, i, p. i8, third ed. 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 75 
 
 you may have seen here and there put into my mouth. 
 I used the word " extirpation ;" in another edition I will try 
 and use some other ; for " extirpation " is " Neo-Latin," and 
 it savours of that " Kenaissance " which, you all know, it is 
 my business, and the business of some others, to reverse.^ 
 But, if I have used the word, I have carefully qualified it. 
 I have said that literal extirpation is impossible ; I have 
 said that women largely survived, that many men survived 
 as slaves. That is, I say that, even in Kent and Sussex, 
 the Britons were not wholly destroyed, that even in Kent 
 and Sussex the blood of the English settlers was from the 
 beginning not wholly pure. And such extirpation, or 
 approach to extirpation, as I assert for certain parts 
 of England I no less emphatically deny for other partH. 
 I limit its operation both in time and in space. I confine 
 it to those parts of England which were conquered before 
 the end of the sixth century. That is, I shut out large 
 districts of the north-west and south-west; I shut out, 
 above all, the great peninsula that stretches from the 
 Mendip Hills to the Land's End. On this last fact, on the 
 fact that, to say nothing of undoubtedly British Cornwall, 
 a large British element did survive in Devonshire and 
 Somerset, I have insisted over and over again. For it is 
 one of the pillars of my doctrine. I have used the contrast 
 between those districts and the more strictly Teutonic 
 districts to the East in the same way, on a smaller scale, in 
 which I have used the contrast between the Teutonic 
 settlements in Gaul and those in Britain. I have used the 
 manifest fact that there was no extirpation in one region as 
 a proof that there was something tending towards extirpa- 
 tion in another. And yet, so oddly is controversy some- 
 times carried on, that I have more than once had this 
 special fact of mine, one of my choicest pet facts, thrown in 
 
 ^ In the pamphlet already referred to, those who held the English language 
 to be worthy of scientific study alongside of the older Aryan tongues were 
 charged with designs against '' the Renaissance," to which they would most 
 likely be ready to plead guilty. 
 
76 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 my teeth as an argument against me. I have been asked, 
 How can you say that all the Britons were extirpated 
 throughout England when it is plain that they were not 
 extirpated in certain parts, say Cumberland or Devonshire ? 
 A searching question indeed to one who had said that all the 
 Britons were extirpated throughout England, but not very 
 trying to one who had only said that they were partly 
 extirpated in part of England. But I repeat that this 
 Neo-Latin word " extirpated " is a bad word. I do penance 
 so far. And looking at what I wrote twenty years ago, 
 at what was reprinted for the last time ten years ago, 
 I think I would now go a little further than the survival 
 of slaves and women. Let me read to you another passage 
 from a later writing of mine. It is from my lectures de- 
 livered in America in the winter of 1881-188 2, that is 
 just half-way between the publication of the last edition of 
 the Norman Conquest and the present day. They too are 
 printed in an American book, but I believe that some few 
 people in this island have seen them. They contain, 
 I suspect, nothing new, but I hope some things true, and 
 they contain the latest saying for which I am answerable in 
 this matter of getting rid of Britons. You will mark that 
 in this passage I try another Neo-Latin word instead of 
 " extirpation," and that I give the Britons, even in Kent and 
 Sussex, another chance beyond what I gave them in the 
 earlier work. Here then is my American utterance ; 
 
 "The plain fact is that, in utter contrast to the phaenomena of Teutonic 
 conquest on the mainland, the Britons were, as a race, exterminated within 
 those parts of Britain which the English occup:ed while they were still 
 heathens. I call your attention to this last qualification ; . . . I call your 
 attention also to the word exterminate. That is one of a class of words which 
 I never use when I can help it ; but I use it in this case, because it expresses 
 what I wish to insist on, and leaves open what I wish to leave open. How 
 far in any particular district the vanquished were slain, how far they were 
 simply driven out, we never can tell. It is enough that they were ex- 
 terminated, got rid of in one way or another, within what now became the 
 English border. And I say exterminated as a race. No one could have ever 
 said or believed, I am sure that I never said or believed, that every single 
 British man, still less that every single British woman, was exterminated in 
 either sense. In such cases some lucky ones among the conquered always 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 77 
 
 contrive to make terms with the conquerors. At the other end, some, whether 
 we call them lucky or unlucky, are spared to be the slaves of the conquered. 
 And women, in all such cases, are largely spared. . . . My proposition simply 
 is that none of these things happened to such a degree as really to affect the 
 practical purity of our Teutonic national being. We must have taken in 
 some Celtic infusion ; we may likely enough have taken in some other 
 infusions of other kinds. All that I maintain is that we took in no such 
 infusion so great as to make us another people in our second home from what 
 we were in our first home. The simple facts of language, of nomenclature, 
 of law and custom, prove that, though we cannot claim an impossible pui-ity 
 of blood, we can claim as near an approach to it as any other people that has 
 played a considerable part in the world's history. . . . We are as pure as the 
 High-Germans ; we are far purer than the French. We are not a MisclivolJc, 
 drawing its blood mainly from one source, while it draws its language from 
 another source, and its national name from a third." ^ 
 
 I have here spoken more at large on some points than I 
 did in the earlier passages, because in the later I am in 
 some sort answering objections which had sprung up. I 
 have done so also, because in the Lectures to American 
 Audiences, as in the essay on Race and Language, the dis- 
 cussion of many general points was in place which would 
 have been less in place in the second chapter of the Norman 
 Conquest, a mere introductory sketch, please to remember, 
 of a time far earlier than that which forms the main subject 
 of the book. Very fully in Race and Language, to some 
 extent in the American Lectures, I go into the question as 
 to what constitutes a race or a nation, taking the word race 
 to mean something wider than the word nation ; as we say 
 the Teutonic race and the English nation. I there try to show, 
 as I have already said, that it is impossible to prove an 
 original community of blood in any - race or nation, and 
 that, granting such original community of blood, adoptions, 
 intermarriages, and the like, have always taken place to 
 such an extent as to destroy any claim on the part of any 
 nation to physical purity of blood. I have said distinctly 
 that no nation can make out its pedigree by such evidence 
 as would satisfy either a lawyer or a physiologist. I argued 
 that the greater the part a nation played in the affairs of 
 the world, the further it was likely to be from ideal purity 
 
 ^ Lectures to American Audiences, p. 133. 
 
78 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 of blood, and that the English people in both hemispheres 
 had played such a part as to entitle it to a large departure 
 from such ideal purity. Yet I argued that the English are 
 a nation, that they are, on both sides of Ocean, the same 
 people which in the fifth century began to cross from the 
 European mainland to the British island, and which in the 
 seventeenth century began to cross from the British island 
 to the American mainland.* How then is such a nation to 
 be defined ? As I understand the case, the best analogy, as 
 I have already suggested, as I worked out more fully in 
 Race and Language,^ is the Roman gens. In the Roman 
 gens we must not assume any actual community of blood 
 among all its members. On the other hand, we must not 
 look on the geris as a purely artificial association from which 
 the idea of community of blood is shut out. The gens starts 
 from the idea of a family; it is in its beginning either a 
 real family or an artificial family. The earliest gentes must 
 have been real families ; some of the later ones may have 
 been, as was the case with some associations in the cities of 
 mediaeval Italy, artificial gatherings after the pattern of 
 real families. But even in those gentes which began as real 
 families, the practice of adoption, to go no further, must 
 soon have destroyed all physical purity of descent. " Ab 
 iEmilio homine iEmilii." ^ Perhaps ^milius — he should 
 surely rather have been iEmilus — was a real forefather ; 
 perhaps he was only a personage invented because an 
 eponymos was the right thing. In either case there must 
 have been plenty of -^milii, who were for all practical 
 purposes as good iEmilii as the rest, but who had no drop 
 of the blood of the first -^milius in their veins. 
 
 So it is with nations. When we speak of Greeks, English, 
 any other nation, we do not mean, we have never meant, 
 to assert anything about physical purity of blood, because 
 absolute physical purity of blood is unlikely in itself, and 
 in any case it cannot be proved. By Greeks or English or 
 
 Historical Essays, Third Series, p. 195. 
 Varro, Ling. Lat. viii. 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN, 79 
 
 any other such name, we mean that company of men, 
 however formed, to which the name of Greek or English 
 historically belongs. We cannot prove any original com- 
 munity of blood ; but the practical likelihood always is that 
 such a company did at first start from real community of 
 blood. The nation began as a real family or collection of 
 families. But, by the working of that principle of legal 
 fictions of which Sii* Henry Maine has taught us so much, 
 the various forms of adoption, the substitution of legal for 
 physical descent, the grant of citizenship to friends and 
 enemies, presently destroyed all claim to unmixed purity 
 of blood. There was no longer any certainty that any par- 
 ticular member physically belonged to the original stock. 
 It might be proved that he did, if his pedigree was pre- 
 served ; failing that, the point was uncertain. But what 
 then 1 The adopted stranger had for all practical purposes 
 become a member, an artificial member but still a real 
 member, of the gens, the nation, or whatever the company was. 
 He had made their speech, their traditions, their thoughts, 
 their whole life, his own; unless somebody measured his 
 skull and found it unlike theirs, no one would ever guess that 
 perhaps, after all, there was no physical community between 
 him and his fellows. And I would not venture to say that 
 this constant intercommunion through many generations 
 may not have had some effect on the body as well as on 
 the mind. The science even of skulls is still in its infancy; 
 it is perhaps better not to be over-positive about it ; but 
 let it be as the most zealous votary of skulls may wish. 
 Let it be that many so-called Englishmen, many who are 
 Englishmen for all historical and all practical purposes, 
 have British or even Iberian skulls. What follows ? The 
 whole thing is merely a question of degree. The discovery 
 at the outside comes to this, that, while we have all along 
 said that there was some foreign mixture in the Greek, the 
 English, or any other nation, that foreign mixture is now 
 shown to be somewhat greater than we had thought. The 
 physiological discovery has its value as a physiological dis- 
 
80 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 covery ; it has to be considered and weighed as to what it 
 proves and what it does not prove in its historic bearing. 
 The main thing that to me it seems to do is very strongly 
 to confii'm those views of national being which I set forth 
 ten years ago. If the real historic life of a nation is, as I 
 have always maintained, something independent of, some- 
 thing higher than, any mere physical community of blood, 
 the strength of that historic life is simply proved to be 
 greater than we had thought, it is shown to have had yet 
 greater power than we had believed of adopting and as- 
 similating and working into its own essence those foreign 
 elements the existence of which in some measure or other 
 no one that I know of has ever denied. Here is a certain 
 company of men called a nation. What we have always 
 held has been that in such a nation there commonly is a 
 certain element which is more than an element, something 
 which is its real kernel, its real essence, something which 
 attracts and absorbs all other elements, so that the other 
 elements are not co-ordinate elements but mere infusions 
 into a whole which is already in being. The utmost that 
 recent discoveries comes to is that such infusions may have 
 been greater than we had thought. But what follows? 
 Surely that the original mass that absorbed and assimilated 
 those foreign elements must have had even greater strength 
 than we had thought it had. If after adopting so many 
 Britons, so many Iberians, we remain Englishmen none the 
 less, surely a new witness is brought to the strength of the 
 English life within us, a life which can thus do the work of 
 the alchymist and change every foreign element into its 
 own English being. 
 
 What I have said of the English nation applies to not 
 a few others. It has been a great part of my business to 
 caU attention to the existence and importance of the arti- 
 ficial Greek nation. In some of my published lectures here 
 I have tried to trace out the various degrees — I called them 
 the various zones — of Greek influence, the original Greek 
 nation itself, the neighbouring nations which we may look 
 
L] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 81 
 
 upon as having become thoroughly Greek by adoption, and 
 so on, through various shades, down to the faint varnish of 
 Greek culture which was spread over the realm, or at 
 least over the court, of the philhellenic kings of Parthia.^ 
 I claimed my own Sikels, I claimed the worshippers of 
 Demeter and her Child on the Sikel hill of Henna, I claimed 
 the man who planned his Hellenic history on the other 
 Sikel hill of Agyrion,^ I claimed the Macedonian and the 
 Epeirot — the armed missionary of Greek life in the East 
 and its armed missionary in the West — as having all been 
 fully brought within the Greek pale, as having become 
 fully entitled for all historic purposes to the honours of the 
 Greek name. But I have never committed myself to any 
 doctrine about the skulls of any of them ; I do not profess 
 to know whether the skull of Diodoros of Agyrion was 
 of exactly the same shape as the skull of Herodotus of 
 Halikarnassos ; I do not know whether the facial angle 
 of Attalos of Pergamon was like or unlike that of Perikles 
 of Athens. It may be that the evidence either of rifled 
 graves or of plundered sculptures may enable other in- 
 quirers to give an answer to both these questions; I have 
 simply never looked on them as coming within my range 
 of research. All that I wished to prove I could prove 
 without them ; all that it was my business to assert, in no 
 way contradicted, and was in no way contradicted by, any 
 conclusions that might be come to on such points. This 
 matter of an artificial Greek nation is really one of the 
 deepest moment with regard to the hopes as well as the 
 memories of South-Eastern Europe. From that side of 
 it I have now been at work at it for more than thirty 
 years. I have been told over and over again that the 
 Greeks for whose freedom I have striven, as far as a single 
 private man can strive, are no Greeks at all, but something 
 
 ^ Chief Periods of European History, pp. 14, 15. 
 
 2 It is always worth remembering that Diodoros, emphatically " of Sicily" — 
 Diodorus Siciilus,— as a man of Sikel Agyrion, was strictly "Siculus," 2t/feXos, 
 not 2t«€Ata;T7;s. 
 
 a 
 
82 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 else, Albanians, Slaves, Latins, for ought I know, Turks. 
 I have always answered that such minute genealogical 
 researches lie outside the range of practical politics, that 
 they are matters for the pedant and the sentimentalist, for 
 the man who dwells only in the past, not for the man 
 who knows, how to grapple with the living problems of 
 his own time. I have always answered that, be a man's 
 forefathers who they may,- he is for all practical purposes 
 a Greek who is Greek by speech and Greek by religion. 
 When I have been told that men in Corfu or Zakynthos 
 had no right to speak for Greek freedom because they 
 themselves bore Venetian names, I have asked back again 
 whether a man in England who chances to bear a Norman 
 name has been thereby always debarred from speaking a 
 word or striking a blow on behalf of English freedom. Or 
 let us go back to an earlier stage. I spoke of an original 
 Greek nation, the kernel, in my view, round which all the 
 adopted elements have gathered. But it would seem from 
 the latest discoveries that, in the physiological sense, there 
 was no origiaal Greek nation at all. The last thing I have 
 heard about it is that either the lonians or the Dorians 
 have been proved by their skulls to be non-Aryan. I really 
 do not remember which way it is, and from my point of 
 view, it matters very little. If in the earliest days of 
 the Greek nation, Dorians assimilated lonians or lonians 
 assimilated Dorians, they only did what the whole formed 
 by their union did afterwards, when they assimilated Sikels, 
 Thesprotians, Macedonians. I neither assert nor deny the 
 proposition ; I only say that, if we are to accept it, all that 
 follows is that we must put the beginning of the process 
 which formed the artificial Greek nation, that is the Greek 
 nation that now is, a few centuries earlier than we had 
 thought. 
 
 I am in truth really at a loss to see ia what way the 
 new physiological discoveries, and their application to the 
 relations of nations, in any way contradict anything that I, or 
 any one who looks at things as I do, have ever said about 
 
L] IN GA UL AND BRITAIN. 83 
 
 the relations between English and Britons or between any- 
 one nation and any other. I do not feel called on to deny 
 a single proposition of theirs ; I do not see why they should 
 feel called on to deny a single proposition of mine. Some 
 of the propositions are, I confess, a little startling ; some, 
 I may say, have long been familiar to me, I am not, I must 
 confess, good at what are called types, but I did, years ago, 
 notice for myself, as Tacitus^ or his informants noticed much 
 earlier, an Iberian type in South Wales. And on its presence 
 1 founded a theory which I will not speak of here, because 
 there may be some South- Welshmen — I am glad to see 
 there is at least one — here present. But it must be re- 
 membered that, twenty years ago, these questions had not 
 come to the front as they have come since. It is likely 
 enough that, if as much had been talked about skulls when 
 the second chapter of the History of the Norman Conquest 
 was written as has been talked since, I might have worded 
 what I said somewhat differently. That is to say, I should 
 certainly not have put forth any view different from that 
 which I did put forth ; but I might have added something 
 to show that that view in no way clashed with any 
 physiological theory. Twenty years ago there was really 
 no need to do anything of the kind. But a theory of 
 an extermination of Britons, universal or anything like 
 universal, throughout the whole of England, I assuredly 
 never did put forth. A dweller in a district where large 
 Celtic traces still survive, and the survival of which traces is 
 one of the main pillars of his whole teaching, is not likely 
 to put forth such a doctrine as that. One whose house is 
 on the slope of Be7i Knoll, who looks out on Pen\nW. and 
 P^^wnard, on Creech Hill and CrooJcs Peak,^ to whom the 
 Celtic comhe is as familiar a word as the Teutonic dale is 
 
 * Tacitus, Agricola, ii. 
 
 ^ Both the Creech and the crooh in these local names, words which have no 
 English meaning, are held to be corruptions of the Welsh craig. Thus Ben 
 Knoll, Crook's Peak, Creech Hill, are all examples of the coupling of names 
 meaning the same thing in different languages. Each is a MoniegiheUo on a 
 small scale. 
 
 G ^ 
 
84 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 to a Yorkshireman, is of all men the least likely to set forth 
 such a doctrine as that the Briton was utterly swept away 
 throughout the whole of what we now call England. 
 A man whose own land is bounded — I have put the fact 
 in print before^ — by the boundary stream which parts the 
 last land in the West won by the heathen English, the last 
 conquest in those lands that wrought mere havoc, from the 
 first conquest of the Christian English, the first conquest 
 that carried with it mere political subjection, is not likely to 
 forget the difference between the two. But when a man's 
 statements are taken apart from the qualifications by which 
 he has carefully guarded them, any man may be made to 
 say anything. And if I did not, twenty years ago, make 
 any reference to discoveries and theories which were then 
 hardly known and which bore but very indirectly on my 
 immediate subject, I did, when they had more fully come 
 to the front, deal largely with their relation to my more 
 general subject in a special essay, that on Race and Lan- 
 guage. I claim, as a matter of common fairness, that all 
 that I have said elsewhere shall be understood according 
 to the principles laid down in that Essay, That is, when 
 I speak of races and nations in the practical and historical 
 sense, I say nothing for or against any physiological theory 
 whatevei*. As I do not bind myself to accept, still less 
 am I in any way called on to dispute, the last discoveries 
 as to skulls brachykephalic and dolikokephalic. I would 
 only say ; let them wait a bit, before we are called on 
 positively to subscribe to them ; meanwhile we are in no 
 way called on to dispute them. 
 
 I have thus, I hope, made good my own position. But 
 I have found it impossible to do that and to deal worthily 
 with certain other positions within the compass of a single 
 lecture. I would therefore bid you again next Thursday, 
 at this same place and hour, when I trust to deal more in 
 detail with certain recent utterances which have naturally 
 drawn to themselves a good deal of attention, and which 
 
 ^ Norman Conqueet, vol. v. p. ix. 
 
I.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN, 85 
 
 might easily be thought to tell against some things which 
 I have always maintained. On the particular points 
 which have been lately discussed I will say nothing to-day. 
 My work of to-day will have been done if I have made 
 it clear that no one that I know of ever maintained a 
 literal extirpation of the Britons throughout all England, 
 but that some have maintained, and, as I hold, rightly 
 maintained, that there was, within certain bounds of time 
 and space, what we may fairly call a displacement for all 
 historical purposes of the British folk by the English. 
 And I would again add that the true nature of such dis- 
 placement may be best understood by comparing our very 
 small knowledge of the settlement of the Angles and 
 Saxons in Britain with our far wider knowledge of the 
 settlement of the Franks in Gaul. 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 In my former lecture I showed, at least I hope so, that 
 the doctrine which I will once more put epigrammatically, 
 that we are ourselves and not somebody else, that the 
 English folk is the English folk and not some other, in no 
 way implies a belief in the literal destruction of every 
 Briton throughout the land which became England. I strove 
 further to show that that doctrine contained nothing which 
 in the slightest degree contradicted any discoveries which 
 physiological science might come to in the matter of skulls 
 or other physical characteristics of this or that nation. 
 I tried further to point out what was the true historic con- 
 ception of a nation, how far it did, and how far it did not, 
 imply community of blood in its members. I tried further 
 to show that the phsenomena of Britain could be rightly 
 understood only by contrasting them with the opposite 
 phsenomena of Gaul. I wish now to deal more in detail 
 with certain things which have been lately said on this 
 matter under circumstances which are likely to clothe them 
 with unusual authority. One of my own colleagues here, 
 not indeed in his character of a professor in this Univer- 
 sity, but in what the world at large may perhaps deem a 
 higher character — at any rate it has a longer description — 
 in the character of President of the Anthropological Section 
 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 
 has, in his discourse at Manchester, treated of many things, 
 some of which concern me to-day, and some do not. Since 
 that discourse was made, there has been a great deal of dis- 
 cussion in the newspapers, mostly on points which do not 
 concern me, but partly on points which do. There was 
 that very emphatic letter in the Times from no less a person 
 
TEUTONIC CONQUEST IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 87 
 
 than Mr. Huxley which I referred to in my previous lec- 
 ture.^ On that I ventured to say a few words in the same 
 paper, not so much by way of controversy as by way of 
 arrest of judgement. Since then some elaborate papers on 
 the races of Britain have appeared in the same quai'ter,^ 
 setting foi'th with some fulness the results, or supposed 
 results, of modern discoveries with regard to the physical 
 features of those races. Now in the original discourse at 
 Manchester there was a great deal of matter, perhaps the 
 most generally exciting matter, about which I have just 
 now nothing to say. For the purposes of these two lectures 
 I am altogether indifferent to all questions as to the original 
 seats of the primitive Aryans. I am veiy far from being 
 indifferent to such questions in themselves ; they are of the 
 deepest interest to all who wish to know anything of the 
 early history of Europe ; but they do not touch our subject 
 of to-day. All that I shall say to-day, all that I said last 
 Thursday, is just as sound or just as unsound, whether the 
 first Aryans came from the East or from the North. All 
 that I have to take for granted is that there is a certain 
 class of people, distinguished in some way from other 
 classes, to whom we give the arbitrary name of Aryans,* 
 and that within that class there is a certain smaller class 
 to which we give the equally arbitrary name of Teutons, l 
 Indeed I am not quite sure that I need think of Aryans at 
 all, or take anything for granted about them. I suspect 
 that it is enough for my purpose that I take for granted 
 that there is, or was, a certain class of people, distinguished 
 in some way from other classes, to whom we give the 
 arbitrary name of Teutons. That is to say, we give them 
 that name in high-polite scientific language ; but the name 
 savours a little of Neo-Latin and of a Renaissance earlier 
 than that of the fifteenth century ; I am always happier when 
 I am with those among whom I can venture to speak of 
 ourselves and our kinsfolk by the kindlier name of Tkcodisc, 
 
 ^ See above, p. 71. 
 
 ' See the Times of October 11 and 25, 18S;. 
 
88 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 Deutsche Butch. Granting then my Teutons or Dutch as a 
 distinct race among men — whatever we mean by race — 
 I have to maintain these propositions. 
 
 First, That certain bodies, tribes or nations as we choose 
 to call them, belonging to this Teutonic or Dutch race, 
 tribes or nations known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes — 
 perhaps other names might be added — did in the fifth and 
 sixth centuries settle in the* isle of Britain, and conquered 
 and occupied a large part of that island. 
 J Second, That within a large part of the land which they 
 conquered and occupied they slew, drove out, or enslaved, 
 those whom they found dwelling there to so great extent 
 that w^e may fairly say that one people was displaced by 
 another. 
 
 U Third, That within certain other districts which they 
 conquered and occupied, we cannot speak of displacement 
 of one people by another ; we must rather say that the con- 
 quered people were so largely mingled with the conquerors 
 and assimilated by them that they may be fairly looked on as 
 becoming members of the conquering nation by adoption. 
 r Fourth, That the Teutonic settlers of the fifth and sixth 
 centuries are the essence of the existing English nation — 
 that any other elements in that nation are not co-ordinate 
 elements but mere infusions into an existing body — that 
 the continuity of national life between those settlers and the 
 existing English nation has never been broken — that their 
 language, their laws, and all that makes up national life, 
 have been largely modified from foreign sources, but that 
 their continuous being has never been broken — that the 
 language, above all, brought into Britain by the settlers of 
 the fifth and sixth centuries, though it has been largely 
 modified by foreign infusion, still keeps its unbroken being 
 and its essential character, and has never at any time been 
 exchanged for any other language. 
 
 Such are the propositions to which my arguments of last 
 Thursday tended, put into a more definite shape. I think 
 that you will aHoAV that my present propositions are essen- 
 
IL] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 89 
 
 tially the same as those which I quoted to you from earlier 
 works of mine and for which alone I am answerable. I have 
 nothing to do with certain other propositions which were 
 never made by me or by any one who takes the same view 
 of things that I do. Whether they were ever seriously made 
 by anybody else I am not called on to inquire. Our busi- 
 ness to-day is to examine more minutely than we did last 
 Thursday whether there is anything in the new discoveries, 
 above all whether there is anything in the setting forth of 
 them made at Manchester, which at all tends to overthrow 
 the propositions that I have drawn out. That Mr. Sayce 
 is not here I deeply regret; but that I could not help. 
 But T had some talk with him on the matter before he set 
 out for Cyprus, and I have to thank him for a copy of his 
 discourse in its most improved shape. 
 
 The part then of the Manchester address which concerns 
 me begins thus ; ^ 
 
 "A few years ago it was the fashion to assert that the English people were 
 mainly Teutonic in origin, and that the older British population had been 
 exterminated in the protracted struggle it carried on with the heathen hordes 
 of Anglo-Saxon invaders." 
 
 Now I did not know that any such assertion had ever 
 been " fashionable." I have always found the " fashion " the 
 other way. My difficulty has always been to persuade 
 people that there was any difference between British and 
 English, to make them see that the men who withstood Csesar 
 and the men who withstood William were not simply the 
 same folk, speaking I suppose the same tongue. I have 
 had to strive with those who were clearly in the same 
 mind as the painter Hay don whe^ he drew " Alfred and the 
 first British Jury." I have had sometimes to strive with 
 those who seemed to think that Arthur and iElfred were 
 themselves the same man. But let us look to this alleged 
 fashionable assertion ; let us turn it about, let us see 
 what it means, and whether anybody ever made it. The 
 first part of it is that " the English people are mainly 
 
 ^ Address, p. 8. 
 
90 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 Teutonic in oiigin." There is a sense in which I should 
 gladly accept this saying, a sense in which I should refuse 
 it, a sense in which I should say that my studies here 
 have nothing to do with the matter. What is meant by 
 "Teutonic'"? what is meant by "origin"? If to say that 
 " the English people are mainly Teutonic in origin " means 
 a doctrine that there is some specially Teutonic shape of 
 skull, common to Arminius; Ataulf, and Frederick Bar- 
 barossa, but different from the skulls of Cassivelaunus and 
 Gruffydd ab Lly welyn, and further that the present English 
 people are mainly descended, physically descended, from 
 people who had skulls of that specially Teutonic shape, 
 I can only say that I never made any such proposition, 
 and that I do not know that anybody else ever made it. 
 I shall certainly not assert such a proposition, because I do 
 not see how it can possibly be proved. Neither will I 
 deny it, because I at least cannot disprove it. Again, if 
 by the English people being mainly of Teutonic origin, 
 there should be meant, as people seem sometimes to under- 
 stand by such phrases, some special connexion with the 
 existing High-German nation and language, some notion 
 that we are a younger branch of that nation, that our 
 language is " derived " from theirs or perhaps is a corruption 
 of theirs or a jumble of theirs with some other tongue, 
 that proposition I should emphatically deny. And let no 
 one say that it is too absurd to deny, because many people 
 practically believe it, even though they may not put the 
 doctrine into a formal shape. But if the words mean no 
 more than I set forth last Thursday, no more than I have 
 put into a more formal shape to-day, I can only say that 
 I have never had the good luck to find such a doctrine 
 fashionable, but that I must still maintain that in that 
 sense, the only sense that I have to do with, "the English 
 people are mainly Teutonic in origin." And further, I 
 cannot see how that proposition, guarded as I have guarded 
 it, clashes with any doctrine about skulls to which inquirers 
 in that line of study may come. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 91 
 
 The remainder of the sentence which I quoted is more 
 remarkable. The doctrine lately fashionable is said to have 
 been that " the elder British population had been extermi- 
 nated in the protracted struggle it carried on with the 
 heathen hordes of Anglo-Saxon invaders." What "elder 
 British population"? As there is no qualification or limi- 
 tation of any kind, the words would be most naturally 
 understood of the British population of the whole island. 
 But I cannot believe that a few years ago it was fashion- 
 able to deny the existence of Welshmen. I at least have 
 never come across any one who held so singular a doctrine. 
 At any rate, no one, with the facts of the day before his 
 eyes, can hold it now. But perhaps one ought to supply 
 a limitation which the speaker does not supply, and to 
 understand the words, not of all Britain, but only of 
 England in the narrowest sense. Let it be so, I am not 
 touched ; no one who thinks with me is touched. I need 
 hardly repeat again that I not only admit, but that I most 
 strongly insist on, the survival of a large British element \ 
 in a large part of what we now call England. But I do 
 remember that some years back a newspaper writer, a clever 
 newspaper writer, argued against me that the population of 
 Devonshire was much more Teutonic than I was inclined to 
 make it.^ Possibly this may be the fashionable doctrine 
 intended ; if so, I at least am not answerable for the say- 
 ings of those who argue against me. Or it may be that 
 a limitation lurks in the phrase " heathen hordes of Anglo- 
 Saxon invaders." The adjective " heathen " may be meant 
 to confine the extermination of the elder British population 
 to the heathen period of English conquest. That is what 
 I have always done ; so it may be that I and the President 
 of the Anthropological Section at Manchester so far mean the 
 same thing. But if so, I really think that the case might 
 be put more clearly ; I even think that I have often put it 
 more clearly. I am sure that most readers would take the 
 
 ^ I cannot give an exact reference to these papers ; tliey were in the rail- 
 Mall Gazette in its elder shape. 
 
92 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 word "heathen " as a strengthening, not as a limiting, ad- 
 jective. It may have been different with hearers at Man- 
 chester ; the living voice may have given the proper em- 
 phasis ; but I am sure that any one, merely reading the 
 printed page, would understand the words as meaning 
 simply to lay stress on the heathen state of these Anglo- 
 Saxon hordes when they landed, perhaps as giving a reason 
 why, blind heathens that they were, they exterminated 
 people. He would hardly take it as meaning that they 
 landed as heathens, that they exterminated as long as 
 they remained heathens, that they afterwards became 
 Christians, and then left off exterminating. If the adjective 
 " heathen " implies all this, it would seem that the scientific 
 language of the British Association is like the Turkish 
 language in Moliere's comedy ; it says a great deal in 
 a few words. 
 
 Well, I think we may say that this fashionable doctrine 
 of the extermination of the elder British population has 
 never been really taught by any one. I at least have 
 never taught it, even in Kent or East-Anglia, without some 
 marked qualification. But let us go on to the arguments 
 by which this doctrine, this, I venture to say, imaginary 
 doctrine, is refuted. Some of them are very curious. The 
 first touches me most keenly. Nobody is so susceptible as 
 a poet, and the first argument, though you might not have 
 expected it, touches me as a poet, at least as a translator 
 of poetry. 
 
 ** The statement in tlie Saxon Chronicle was quoted that the garrison of 
 Anderida, or Pevensey, when captured by the Saxons in a.d. 491, were all 
 put to the sword. But it is obvious that the fact would not have been 
 singled out for special mention, had it not been exceptional." 
 
 Now there is something very odd in this picture of a 
 Saxon Chronicler, sitting down, like a grave critical 
 historian, to single out facts for special mention, because 
 they were exceptional. I have heard several theories of 
 the compilation of the Chronicles, but I do not remember 
 any that put the process exactly in this light. But I do 
 
II.J Ii\ GAUL AND BRITAIN. 93 
 
 grant that there is something exceptional in the passage. 
 It is undoubtedly the grandest case of killing and slaying 
 recorded in the whole story, and there is an exceptional 
 reason why it should be. As a case of killing and slaying, 
 the summary of the President of the Anthropological Section 
 does but scant justice to it. He distinctly undervalues the 
 exterminating powers of the heathen hordes of Anglo- 
 Saxon invaders. Put a garrison to the sword — Does any 
 one think that our forefathers stopped at that? Why 
 many a Spanish army, many a French army, in later times 
 could do that much. Gibbon, though he seems to have 
 got at his English only through a Latin crib, better under- 
 stood the " expression so dreadful in its simplicity"^ — " Her 
 -^lle and Cissa ymbssetan Andi*edesceaster, and ofslogon 
 ealle )?a ^e J^ser inne wseran. )78et j^ser ne wear's fur"Sum dn 
 Bryt to lafe." Garrison forsooth ! They slew all that were 
 within the Chester^ so that not a Bret was left. Here is 
 extermination indeed ; but we are told that it was ex- 
 ceptional, so exceptional that it struck the mind of the 
 Chronicler and that he specially recorded it. In a sense 
 this is true ; the entry does stand by itself, because it is 
 the one clear case, at this stage of the history, of a Roman 
 Chester taken by storm. The only other case the least like 
 it is the taking of Wihtgaresbyrig in 530, when also many 
 men were slain, but where it is not said whether any were 
 left or not. But that is a good deal later, and Wihtgares- 
 byrig is not so certainly a Roman chesler as Andredesce«*^^r. 
 In the storm of a town an universal massacre can take 
 place ; in a battle in the field, where some are sure to run 
 away, it hardly can. The truth is that we have in this 
 entry a scrap or a summary of an ancient poem preserved 
 in a Latin shape by Henry of Huntingdon. So I firmly 
 hold, notwithstanding some late objections;^ but I cannot 
 argue that point just now. If any one fails to hear in the 
 Latin prose of the Archdeacon a ring, a feeble ring, if you 
 
 * Chap, xxxviii. note 142. 
 
 ^ Tiiebennanii; Forschuni^en zur Deutschen Geschiclite, viii, 224. 
 
94 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 please, of the grand old war-song, but as near an approach 
 to its ancient rhythm as we hear in his version of the Song 
 of Brunanburh — why, I cannot argue with him. At the 
 Lewes meeting of the Archaeological Institute in 1883, I 
 ventured to try to put back the Song of Anderida into 
 something like its ancient shape ;^ but, as I felt scruples 
 about quoting my own prose, I feel scruples still stronger 
 about reciting to you from this chair something which I 
 myself put into a shape which approaches to the nature of 
 verse. Yet here is a piece of it ; 
 
 And when the burghers, 
 Worn with long hunger, 
 No more could thole 
 The weight of storming, 
 With the sword's edge 
 All were smitten, 
 Wives too and bairns, 
 Not one was left.* 
 
 The slaughter was exceptional, because wives and bairns 
 within the walls of a stormed town had not that chance of 
 fleeing like fire which a defeated army has on a field of 
 battle, and which we read elsewhere that the Welsh did 
 before the English.^ After all, this indiscriminate slaughter 
 is no more than the Romans did at New Carthage and at a 
 crowd of other places. It is not in truth quite so much, 
 for the Romans slew, not the garrison only, as our fathers 
 are misrepresented to have done, not only the wives and 
 bairns, but the dogs and every living creature that they 
 met in the streets.* To be sure, when they were deemed 
 to have killed enough, the general called them off. Perhaps 
 iElle and Cissa did not think of giving such orders ; 
 perhaps they would not have been obeyed if they had, 
 
 * Archaeological Journal, vol. xl. p. 327, January, 1884. 
 
 ' In the Latin of Henry of Huntingdon, ii. 10, this stands; "Tunc vero cives 
 diuturna fame contriti, cum jam pondus infestantium perferre nequirent, omnes 
 ore gladii devorati sunt cum mulieribus et parvulis, ita quod nee unus solus 
 evasit." 
 
 ' Chronn. 465 ; '' Her Hengest and iEsc gefuhton wifJ Wealas neah Wip- 
 pedes fleote and J)3er ofslogan xii. Wylisc ealdonnen and heora Jjter wearS an 
 ofslegen ])am waes nama Wipped." 
 
 * Folybios, x. 15. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 95 
 
 I think then that we may fairly set down the slaughter 
 of Anderida, if exceptionally great, as exceptionally great 
 only because there were exceptional opportunities for 
 slaughtering. It is, I repeat, our one recorded example of 
 the fate of a stormed town. Eut where in other places we 
 see that the walls and buildings of a Roman Chester under- 
 went the same fate as those of Anderida — when we listen to 
 the gleeman of an after age musing amid the ruins of Aquae 
 Sulis,^ when we read the tale of the fall and rising again of 
 Deva, when we look for ourselves on the empty walls of 
 Calleva — we feel that something happened to those cities 
 when Ceawlin and iEthelfrith drew near to them which 
 did not happen when Childeric or Chlodowig drew near 
 to the civitas Suessiomim or the civifas Paris'wrnnu The 
 Suessiones and the Parisii lived on ; they abide still ; 
 where are the men of Uriconium and the men of the Icenian 
 Venta ? We may be sure that 
 
 With the sword's edge \ 
 All were smitten ; 
 
 and it is likely enough that 
 
 Wives too and bairns, 
 Not one was left. 
 
 Yet it does not follow that, when men, not heated by the 
 fierce passions of a storm, came to some more peaceful 
 settlement, they may not sometimes have thought that it 
 was worth their while to save alive at least the wives and 
 bairns to work for their profit. It may even be that here 
 and there the men of a Roman chester — say of the Colony of 
 Camulodunum or of the old town of Augusta which before, 
 and after too, was called London ^ — warned by the doom of 
 Anderida and her fellows, may have thought it wise not to 
 stay 
 
 To thole 
 The weight of storming ; 
 
 * See Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature, 140. 
 
 ^ Ammianus, xxviii. 3. i ; " Ab Augusta profectus, quam veteres appella- 
 vere Lundinium." 
 
96 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 they may have bought their lives by some speedy bowing 
 to the invaders ; they may even have kept on their being 
 as a town till Englishmen ceased to look on a walled city 
 as a prison. To milder moments like these we may owe 
 the presence among us of some British and even of some 
 Iberian skulls. I never denied it. 
 
 But it is going rather too far to argue that no Englishman 
 can have English foremothers of the fifth or sixth century 
 as well as forefathers. At this point the Manchester dis- 
 course goes on to say ; 
 
 " It is equally obvious tliat invaders who came by sea can hardly liave 
 brought their wives and children with them, and must have sought for both 
 wives and slaves in the natives of the island." 
 
 It is hard to see against whom this argument is meant to 
 tell ; no one that I know of has ever denied that women 
 and slaves were largely spared. Yet it is equally obvious 
 that in some other cases it has been at least believed that 
 invaders who came by sea have brought women with them. 
 Take for instance the case of the Italian Lokroi. There, 
 as every reader of Polybios will remember/ nobility went 
 by the mother. The received explanation of this custom 
 was that Lokroi was founded by men of mean birth, who 
 brought with them a number of women of honourable 
 families. I do not insist on this story as historical, though 
 I would not take upon myself positively to deny it ; but 
 I certainly conceive that those who are learned in the lore 
 of customs and institutions would find another explanation 
 for this curious bit of primitive law. But tales of this 
 kind, whether true or not as matter of fact, have their 
 value ; they point to what is looked on as possible ; no one 
 in Lokroi would have seen any absurdity in believing that 
 some at least of the Teutonic settlers brought women with 
 them. I pointed out long ago that the curious legend of 
 Vortigern and Hengest's daughter looks the same way;^ 
 there is a crowd of stories in which the invader by sea 
 
 * Polybios, xii. 5. 
 
 ^ Norman Conquest, i. 18. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 97 
 
 takes the daughter of the prince of the land; here the 
 invader by sea has his daughter ready with him, and the 
 prince of the land takes her. And in days when digging 
 and skull-measuring was a younger science than it is now, 
 it was always believed that Dr. Eolleston had set the point 
 at rest in some of his researches. I once ventured to say 
 that he had seen our Teutonic grandmothers.^ Nobody 
 ever doubted that these invaders, like all invaders, largely 
 took the women of the conquered to themselves. I have 
 insisted on the fact over and over again, and here it is 
 brought forward as if it were a new discovery. British 
 captives were doubtless largely the mothers of the present 
 English people ; it is not proved that they were their 
 only mothers. In the great English settlement of later 
 times it is thought honourable to be descended from Poco- 
 hontas ; but nobody has argued that Pocohontas and others 
 of her race were the only mothers of the English people in 
 their third home. 
 
 The next point is that Mr. Coote and Mr. Seebohm have 
 " pointed out the continuity of laws and customs and terri- 
 torial rights between the Roman and the Saxon seras." 
 Here I must crave for some indulgence. I had always 
 meant to come to Mr. Coote some day, but, according to 
 the scheme which I had traced out, not to-day or to-morrow. 
 I believe I can answer him ; but I certainly cannot answer 
 him in a single sentence of a single lecture. Mr. Coote 
 was a real scholar ; a wrong-headed scholar, I must think, 
 but still a scholar. He had read a great deal, but he had 
 read it in a perverse kind of way. I should doubt whether 
 it had occurred to him to make that comparison between 
 the phsenomena of Gaul and the phsenomena of Britain 
 which I hold to be the essence of the whole matter.^ 
 Mr. Seebohm too we have to thank for an instructive map 
 
 ^ Historical Essays, i. 37. 
 
 ^ The last of the four papers in Macmillan's Magazine to which I referred 
 above was directly designed as an answer to Mr. Coote, but of course I could 
 not go fully into every point. 
 
 H 
 
98 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 of the parish of Hitchin and for a good deal of information 
 about common lands. But he has not convinced me that 
 the Teutonic invaders of Britain came from somewhere in 
 central or southern Germany, and — what must follow if 
 they did — that they met somebody on the road who 
 persuaded them that they were Angles and Saxons from 
 the old Anglian and Saxon lands.^ I cannot undertake to 
 enter into Mr. Seebohm's theories now any more than into 
 Mr. Coote's ; I will throw out only two little hints. If the 
 invaders found the land neatly and clearly meted out, I 
 know not why they should not have kept the boundaries 
 of an estate, even though they knocked its owner on the 
 head. And I am yet more inclined to believe that, if they 
 found the land tilled in a way that suited the soil, they 
 would go on tilling it in that way, and would not bring in 
 some other way from the old country which might very 
 well suit northern Germany, but which would not suit 
 southern Britain. 
 
 The next argument is in some ways the most amazing 
 of all ; 
 
 " Anthropologists have insisted that the survival of early racial types in all 
 parts of the country cannot be accounted for by the settlement of the Bretons 
 ■who followed William the Conqueror or of the Welsh who came into Eng- 
 land when the penal laws against them were repealed by Henry VIII." 
 
 " Racial types " — I fancy the word " racial " is not even 
 Neo-Latin ; I think it has been invented in my own time ; 
 it strikes me as an ugly invention, and I certainly do not 
 know how to form it in any language. But let that pass ; 
 I will not trouble about words. But I should like to know 
 who it was who attributed the survival of types, or any- 
 thing else, to the Bretons who followed William the Con- 
 queror. That would be to assign a very great place in the 
 history of mankind to Alan of Richmond and Judhael of 
 Totnes ; for the survival could hardly be the work of those 
 
 * I hope I am not unfair to Mr. Seebohm. The general impression given 
 me by his ninth and tenth chapters, and specially by page 373, is that he 
 thinks that the English came from South Germany. He seems not to see the 
 difficulties which are involved in such a belief. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 99 
 
 Breton followers of Kalph of Wader whom Lanfranc so 
 uncivilly called " filth," and rejoiced that the King's men, 
 French and English, had di'iven them out of the kingdom.^ 
 I can at least heartily agree with the President of the 
 Anthropological Section in casting aside that doctrine. 
 Only again, who ever put it forth? As for the later 
 Welshmen, surely some came in between William and 
 Henry, Sir David Gam and a few others, as I am happy to 
 say that a good many more have come in in yet later times. 
 And again, we are not to-day discussing law; but was it 
 ever, strictly speaking, " penal " to be a Welshman ? I mean 
 at any time since the old days of Harold's legislation about 
 Offa's dyke.^ Moreover, I had somehow got into my head 
 that the "early racial types" were now said not to be 
 Welsh at all, but something older than Welsh ; still, never 
 mind; to anybody who ever taught the actual extermi- 
 nation of every single Briton or creature older than Briton, 
 these early racial types would doubtless be a difficulty. 
 Only how do they touch me or any one who thinks as I do 1 
 Is not "the survival of early racial types" simply putting 
 into grander and more scientific language the fact on which 
 I have insisted a dozen times since the beginning of these 
 lectures and a hundred times before, the fact that some of 
 the earher inhabitants survived in all parts of the country, 
 and in some parts a great many ? 
 
 But now comes the great argument of all, before which 
 the defeated Teuton is to give way, and to hide himself, 
 I suppose, in his native woods beyond the sea, if he can 
 find three keels to take him back thither. Let us hear 
 the words of the address ; 
 
 " But the advocates of the theory of extermination have always one argu- 
 ment which seemed to them unanswerable, and which indeed was the origin of 
 their theory. The language of the Anglo-Saxons contains hardly any words 
 borrowed from Keltic. Such a fact was held to be inexplicable except on the 
 
 ^ See Lanfranc's Letters, 38 (i. 57, Giles). "Gloria in excelsis Deo, cujus 
 misericordia regnum vestrum purgatum est spurcitia Britonum." 
 ^ Norman Conquest, ii. 484. 
 
 H 2 
 
\i 
 
 100 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 hypothesis that the speakers of the Keltic dialects were all exterminated 
 before any intercourse was possible between them and the invading Teuton." 
 
 Now this fairly takes away one's breath. The ground 
 seems to be altogether changed from what it was a few 
 minutes back. Just now the fashionable doctrine was said 
 to be that the Britons were exterminated in a " protracted 
 struggle." A protracted struggle would seem almost of 
 necessity to imply some intercourse between the two 
 sides ; they come to know something about one another, 
 and commonly to pick up a little of one another's language. 
 But now the protracted struggle has vanished. The in- 
 vading Teutons now come down like a single flash of 
 lightning ; the speakers of the Celtic dialects are all exter- 
 minated before any intercourse is possible between them 
 and the invaders. This is truly a wonderful teaching. 
 Only who ever taught it? Not the writers of the Chronicles, 
 I am sure. When, under the year 501, they record that 
 certain invading Teutons " slew a young British man very 
 noble," ^ there must have been intercourse, perhaps only 
 the intercourse which goes before extermination, but still 
 intercourse enough for the slayers to find out that the 
 young man whom they slew was very noble. Still more 
 sure am I that I never taught all this. I must again quote 
 myself, though this time luckily in humble prose. After the 
 words which I before quoted, those in which I laid down that, 
 while the men were either killed or driven out or enslaved 
 — do not forget the fourth chance which I gave them in my 
 American Lectures — the "women were doubtless often 
 spared," I go on thus ; 
 
 " The nature of the small Celtic element in our language would of itself 
 prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which has found its way into 
 ( English expresses some small household matter, such as women and slaves 
 would be concerned with."^ 
 
 This is, I must think, a very different story from the 
 
 ^ Chronn. 501 ; " And ofslogon aenne gungne Brytiscne man swi"Se 
 seSelne." 
 
 ^ Norman Conquest, i, 19. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 101 
 
 position that the conquered were aU got rid of before the 
 conquerors had picked up a single word of their tongue. 
 There is, to be sure, the terrible fact that some very far- 
 going Dutchmen tell me, what distresses me not a little, 
 that there is no Celtic element in English at all. It was 
 so pleasant to bless ourselves, if not in our store, at least in 
 our basket, by thinking that " basket " was British " bas- 
 cauda," staying straight on through all these ages. I am 
 now told that that is all wrong, and I am sorry for it ; but 
 those who believed in that basket were at least a long way 
 from this doctrine of extermination without exchange of 
 a single word which we are told was fashionable a few 
 years ago. 
 
 Now the great position which is wholly to upset us is 
 this, that those whom the Angles and Saxons found in those 
 parts of the island which th^ir coming turned into England 
 did not speak Celtic but Latin. Now this is not a proposition 
 to be trifled with. It is a serious proposition, supported by 
 serious arguments. I cannot say that I am as yet con- 
 vinced by it ; but I could not venture offhand to deny it. 
 It needs careful examination, and, from those who are not 
 convinced by it, it deserves a serious answer. But it is 
 plain that I cannot go into it to-day ; it must wait till its 
 turn comes in my long journey. For the present I am 
 satisfied that, if I should ever come to accept it, it wiU not 
 at all upset my case, but wiU, for some purposes, greatly 
 strengthen it. 
 
 Let it then be that the people of Britain in 449 spoke LatiiC- 
 as the most usual language of the country, as we know that 
 the people of Gaul did. The facts remain the same ; the 
 contrast remains the same. In Gaul the language of the 
 country lived through the Teutonic conquest ; in Britain 
 it died out in the process of that conquest. It died out just 
 the same, whether it was Welsh or Latin. As we do not 
 speak Welsh, so neither do we speak Latin, except so far 
 as Neo-Latin has crept in among us in later times. The 
 fact of the displacement of one language by another sap- 
 
102 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 plies exactly the same presumption of the displacement of 
 the speakers of one language by the speakers of the other, 
 whether we conceive the language displaced to have been 
 Welsh or to have been Latin. Or rather, if we conceive 
 the language to have been Latin, it supplies the presump- 
 tion in a much stronger form than if we conceive it to have 
 been Welsh. Now I had always believed that Britain 
 under Roman rule was much less thoroughly Romanized 
 than Gaul was. I still think that there is something to say 
 for that doctrine ; but again I cannot say it to-day. But 
 let us accept the new teaching ; let it be that, in the words 
 of the address at Manchester, "Roman Britain was in the 
 condition of Roman Gaul ; " if it be so, so much the better 
 for my argument. To get rid of Latin was a much greater 
 feat on the part of the Teutonic invaders than to get rid of 
 Welsh. We may conceive the speakers of one uncultivated 
 tongue exchanging that tongue for another uncultivated 
 tongue, especially if the tongue that they adopted was the 
 tongue of conquerors. If it be true that there is a large 
 Iberian element surviving in England, in Wales, in Ireland, 
 the Iberians of those lands must, at some time or other, 
 have exchanged their Iberian speech for Celtic. But one 
 never heard of a cultivated people, speaking a cultivated 
 tongue, exchanging that tongue for the speech of uncul- 
 tivated conquerors who were conquerors and nothing more. 
 This is what the address supposes the Britons to have done. 
 In the words of a sentence a little way further on, it is said 
 that " the British population, instead of being exterminated, 
 lived under and by the side of their Teutonic invaders." 
 This brings us at once back to the argument which is at 
 the root of the whole matter, to the contrast on which I 
 have to insist on at every moment. If the British popula- 
 tion lived on by the side of their Teutonic invaders, then 
 they were in exactly the same case as the Gaulish popula- 
 tion — I should rather say the Roman population of Gaul. 
 Teutonic conquest was essentially the same thing in Biitain 
 that it was in Gaul. Why then were its results so different 
 
II.] FN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 103 
 
 in the two countries ? Why were its results in Britain so 
 different from what they were in any other country 1 ^ How 
 was it that the provincials of Gaul, living by the side of 
 their Teutonic invaders, kept their language^ their reli- > 
 gion, their whole framework of society, while the provincials 
 of Britain, in exactly the same case, lost theirs? The* 
 argument that I have used from the beginning is greatly 
 strengthened if we suppose Latin to be the language spoken 
 by the men thus living side by side with their conquerors. 
 Those who thus lived side by side with their conquerors in 
 Gaul, in Spain, in Lombardy, kept their language. Why 
 did those who were in exactly the same case- in Britain lose 
 theirs ? I answer once more, because the people of Britain 
 did not live by the side of their conquerors in the same 
 way that the people of Gaul or Spain or Italy — because in 
 Britain there was a real displacement of o ne pe ople by 
 another, while in Gaul, Spain, and Italy there was not. 
 
 Now at this point of the argument extremes meet. I 
 regretted that I had lately been deprived of my two or 
 three Celtic words in English by the zeal of some who 
 were specially Teutonic. I now find the same fact, or 
 alleged fact, used from the opposite side. According to 
 the Manchester Address, " it is not Keltic but Latin words 
 that we must expect to have borrowed by Anglo-Saxon." 
 So I suppose my pet basket is taken from me on this side 
 also. We then get a reference to Mr. Earle, and a list 
 of plants whose English names are borrowed from the 
 Latin. Perhaps this is a fact that I have never known 
 how to make the right use of ; but it is a fact which I have 
 known for many years, and of which I have at last tried 
 to make some use. In the fifth volume of the History of 
 
 * I ouglit perhaps to except certain lands immediately on the Ehine and the 
 Danube, where the phsenomena came nearer to those of Britain than any other 
 parts of the mainland, where there was something which came nearer than 
 elsewhere to the displacement of one people by another. Yet even here, 
 though the great cities were often taken, Christianity and city life never quite 
 died out. 
 
104 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 the Norman Conquest/ published in 1876, I discuss at 
 some length both the supposed Welsh infusion into Eng- 
 lish, and the two stages of early Latin infusion, the second 
 dating only from the conversion of the English, the earlier 
 one — words like 2^0^'i') ^^''i'eet, and chester, of which the Man- 
 chester address says nothing — dating from our first settle- 
 ment in Britain or even before it. I then go on to say, 
 with references to Mr. Earle, Dr. Morris, and Mr. Pearson ; 
 
 "There is also a string of Latin words, names of fruits and the like, of 
 which it is not easy to say whether they belong to the first or to the second 
 infusion, whether we found them in the land and learned their names from 
 the Britons, or whether missionaries, merchants, or pilgrims brought in names 
 and things alike during the second stage. In either case the names of the 
 pear and the cherry came into our language by a process exactly similar to 
 that which has made tea and coffee familiar words in later times." 
 
 In the case of the cherry, the Manchester Address has hit 
 on one of the game illustrations that I then chose. The fruit 
 of Kerasos has been carried to many lands, and it has carried 
 its name with it. So with the agricultural names. I said in 
 my first volume ^ that " nearly all the words belonging to the 
 nobler callings, all the terms of government and war, and 
 nearly all the terms of agriculture, are thoroughly Teutonic." 
 The Manchester Address bears out my word "nearly" in 
 the case of terms of agriculture, by quoting one tool with a 
 Welsh and one with a Latin name. It does not dispute the 
 accuracy of my word " all " as applied to terms of war and 
 government. How, I again ask, did it come, on the theory 
 of the Manchester Address, that in Britain all Latin terms 
 of war and government and all Latin terms of agriculture 
 save one, the obstinate coulter^ gave way to Teutonic names, 
 while in Gaul the Latin names lived on, with a Teutonic 
 infuiiion which is almost invisible"? Why, I ask, on the 
 new theory, were there khigs in Britain, regcs in Gaul, 
 heretogan in Britain, duces in Gaul, ealdormen in Britain, 
 seniores in Gaul, geudas in Britain, comites in Gaul? Had, 
 I repeat, the state of Britain in the sixth century been the 
 same as the state of Gaul, the abiding results would be the 
 
 ^ Norman Conquest, v. 517. ^ Vol. i. p. 19. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 105 
 
 same. Instead of having taken several infusions of Latin 
 words into our Teutonic tongue, we should have simply 
 spoken a Romance tongue like our neighbours. Instead of 
 merely calling our pears and cherries by Latin names, we 
 should, like our neighbours, have had Latin names for our 
 kings, our swords, our wives, our houses, our hounds and 
 horses, our bread and ale, and every other thing that we 
 have. 
 
 We are then triumphantly told that "the philological 
 argument has thus been cut away from under the feet of 
 the advocates of the theory of extermination, and shown to 
 tell precisely the contrary tale." Knowing of no advocates 
 of any such theory of extermination as the Address 
 supposes, I am not greatly concerned whether any argu- 
 ment, philological or otherwise, is cut from under their feet 
 or not. But I have to thank the author of the Address for 
 a philological argument, which, when I have been able to 
 consider it more fully, I may accept or reject, but which, if 
 I do accept it, I shaU welcome as a new and powerful 
 support of the only doctrine that I have ever maintained. 
 The question that follows, whether there really are any 
 Welshmen, concerns some others more than it concerns me. 
 It seems to be essentially a revival of the older theory of 
 Mr. Thomas Wright, of a conquest of what is now Wales by 
 the northern Cymry about the same time as the conquest 
 of what is now England by the Angles and Saxons. That 
 theory too I may have to see to some day or other. I will 
 only say now that the disappearance of Latin, by any other 
 process than that of displacement of its speakers, at the 
 hands of Celtic invaders, is just as amazing, just as contrary 
 to all experience elsewhere, as the like disappearance at 
 the hands of Teutonic invaders. 
 
 It is perhaps an useful warning that " the limitations and 
 relations of dolichocephalism and brachycephalism within 
 the [Celtic] race need further investigation." Those outside 
 the immediate range of dolichokephalism and brachy- 
 kephalism may perhaps carry the warning a little further. 
 
106 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 While accepting the alleged discoveries in this line as 
 contributions to knowledge to be carefully and respectfully 
 weighed, they will decline to pledge themselves to any of 
 their results as infallible truth till that further investigation 
 has taken place. With these cautions, the believers in the 
 doctrine that the English people still is the English people 
 will not find anything very frightful in two articles pub- 
 lished in the Times last Octofcer under the heading of the 
 " Biitish Eace-Types of To-Day." The first of course begins 
 with some of the usual protests against doctrines which 
 nobody ever held, but when we come to the actual results of 
 dolichokephalic and brachykephalic research, we can easily 
 live through them. It is just as it ought to be when we 
 read that "Yorkshire is strikingly Teutonic, Northumber- 
 land and Durham are mainly Anglian, with a considerable 
 infusion of Danish." It is a purely domestic difficulty 
 when we ask how the Danes come to be in Bernicia when 
 we should rather have looked for them in Deira. " Kent, 
 Sussex, and Hampshire are mainly Saxon." That is com- 
 foi^tiug. " In Berkshire and Oxfordshire and Western 
 Gloucestershire the Saxons predominate. Around Aylesbury 
 too the Saxons are in force." They certainly came to Ayles- 
 bury in some force in 571, and they seem to have sta^^ed 
 on there. In Berkshire too it is pleasant to hear that the 
 stock of Godric of Fifhide and Thurkill of Kingston has 
 not died out. When I read that " Staffordshire and Derby- 
 shire are largely Anglian, the people having lighter hair 
 than in almost any other county," I so greatly rejoice in 
 this picture of my own immediate countrymen that I care 
 less for a little sub-theory of mine — that phrase has, I 
 think, a scientific sound — that the Peak never was 
 strictly English at all, but that Danes conquered it from 
 Britons. I pass on, with satisfaction only less complete, 
 from the land of my birth to the land of my adoption. 
 "We find in Somerset and Devon" — the Chronicles say 
 " Somerset and Devonshire " — " a mixed type, showing 
 intermediate characters between Saxons and darker people, 
 
IL] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 107 
 
 the numbers of the latter decidedly increasing " — increasing, 
 I suppose, as we go westward. Is not this just what I have 
 always insisted on ? I should always have looked in those 
 parts for an intermediate character between Saxons and 
 something. Only I do not quite like these " darker people." 
 That even in Kent and Sussex somebody not Jutish or Saxon 
 should have lingered on in woods and marshes does not 
 trouble me. But I had hoped that such survivors would at 
 least have been good Welshmen, or, if it is better liked, good 
 Romans ; but it seems that they are " dark -featured people," 
 about whom I do not quite understand when it is added 
 that they are " probably of early British descent." Through- 
 out it is not the Britons that trouble us ; it is these dark 
 people who, it seems, are sometimes Iberians, sometimes 
 Phoenicians, sometimes, it is painful to write it, Mongols 
 or something in that line. Mongols, it seems, or persons of 
 "Mongoloid" affinity, are found thickly settled in the 
 heart of Wales. That is very sad ; but it is some comfort 
 on the other hand to read that "on the south coast, in 
 Monmouthshire, Glamorgan and Pembrokeshire, the hair 
 and eyes are much lighter, due to Saxon, Norman, and 
 Flemish colonization." I wonder whether dolichokephalic 
 science has got so minute as to be able to know a West- 
 Saxon skull from that of a Fleming, and to tell me whether 
 Gower was or was not settled from Somerset. 
 
 On the whole, we Dutchmen of all kinds are left very 
 much as we were. If our area is here and there cut a little 
 shorter than we had fancied, it is only a little. Perhaps 
 after all two or three of the dark type crept out of Anderida 
 by some postern or some breach in the wall. It is the 
 Welsh who have to look out. It is of them, not of the 
 English, that the new science writes its wonderful and 
 horrible things. I do not at all relish it, if our British 
 neighbours, whom we used to look on as at least Aryan 
 cousins, cousins fully reconciled, are to be turned into these 
 strange beings with "Mongoloid affinities." I do not 
 expect Cornwall to be Teutonic; it would upset all my 
 
108 TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 notions if it were ; but I am somewhat grieved about the 
 Phoenicians and Jews. Must we after all see on every- 
 day of Jove the bitterness of Zion at Market-Jew, and is a 
 date to be found for King Aleph — rex nnins literce — and 
 even for King Hannibal Grylls ^^ Untouched as a Teuton, 
 I still feel as a would-be Aryan ; and I do hope that the 
 limitations and relations of dolichokephalism and brachy- 
 kephalism may in this matter receive some further investi- 
 gation. 
 
 How then does the matter stand? Much as it did 
 before, as far as the folk of the Angles and Saxons have 
 to deal with it. Let the Britons see to their own house ; 
 at any rate no folk on earth is better provided with a 
 Professor to keep it for them. I feel very much as I did 
 some years back, when Mr. Elton put forth his Origins of 
 English History. Then too there was a great flourish of 
 trumpets to say that some supposed Teutonic theory was 
 set aside for ever, that Mr. Elton had come as the wild 
 boar out of the wood, to root up, not only myself here 
 present, but also the Bishop of Chester, Mr. Green, and 
 certain other. Yet we went through the ordeal unscathed. 
 In Mr. Elton's book I found a mass of most curious learn- 
 ing on subjects which I had never thought about ; I found 
 nothing to upset any doctrine to which I had ever attached 
 the slightest importance. So it is now. I can give the 
 physiological discoverers all thanks ; I can wish them all 
 good luck ; they teach me several things which I did not 
 know before ; they upset no article of my historic creed. 
 There is nothing in their lore which compels those who 
 believe the English folk to be the English folk to recant 
 anything. We may still hold that 
 
 "From the East hither 
 Angles and Saxons 
 Up became. 
 Over the broad brim 
 
 ^ The kings who bore these odd Semitic names have no place in real 
 history ; but they will be found in older and newer romances of Hereward. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. 109 
 
 Britain they sought, 
 Lordly warsmiths, 
 Welsh they overcame, 
 A land they gat them." * 
 
 And in that land we their children still dwell. In them, in 
 our fathers, we came hither, a company of men on whose 
 physical origin and physical characters I do not presume to 
 risk a judgement, but who had a common speech, a speech of 
 the class conventionally known as Teutonic, who had com- 
 mon beliefs, common customs, all in common that goes to , 
 make up a national life. We gradually came to call ourselves 
 by a common name, to obey a common prince, to act in\ 
 all things as an united nation. Moreover in the land where 
 we settled we found men of another speech, other beliefs, 
 other customs, with all in short that goes to make up 
 national life other than our own. In the greater part of 
 the land, the speech, the belief, the customs, of that other 
 people so thoroughly passed away that it is hard to come 
 to any other conclusion than that one company of men, 
 one nation, if we choose so to call it, has so far displaced 
 another that any remnants of the elder nation that lived i 
 on abide as mere survivals. Some here and there may have 
 escaped to woods and marshes ; here and there we spared 
 a woman, a child, a suppliant who craved for mercy, and 
 who lived on as an useful theow, to teach us the Latin 
 names of the cherry and the coulter. In another part of 
 the land, though there was no such displacement as this, 
 yet we became so largely dominant as gradually to assimi- 
 late the elder folk to our own likeness. Our nation thus 
 formed, known on our own lips as English, on the lips of 
 the elder folk as Saxon, has ever since kept its ground and 
 remained the abidingr folk of the land. In the fourteen 
 
 ^ Chronn. 937, at the end of the Song of Brunanburh; 
 ** Si))l)an eastan hider* Wlance wigsmij)a8* 
 
 Engle and Seaxe- Wealas ofercoman* 
 
 Up becoman. Eorlas arwate 
 
 Ofer brad brimu Eard begeatan." 
 
 Brytene sohtan 
 
no TEUTONIC CONQUEST [Lect. 
 
 hundred years since our first settlement, in the nine 
 hundred years since we became an united people, we have 
 had to deal with some whom we conquered and with some 
 who conquered us ; but we adopted, assimilated, absorbed, 
 
 C alike conquerors and conquered into the very essence of 
 bur national being. We took in not a few foreign elements ; 
 but we took them in as mere infusions into an existing body. 
 We doubtless underwent some change through such infu- 
 sions ; we are not in all things as we should have been if the 
 Dane, the Norman, the Fleming, the Poitevin, the Huguenot, 
 the Palatine, had never come among us. But none of 
 1 these strangers has wrought in us such a change as really 
 \ to break the continuity of our national life, and some of 
 the so-called strangers might truly pass for later waves of 
 the first settlement. 9"^ ^^-^^ ^^^ never changed its 
 national name or its national speech. The Englishman 
 still abides an Englishman, while the Gaul first became 
 a Boman, and then the Boman, taking in a certain Teutonic 
 infusion, grew into a Frenchman. Our old Teutonic speech 
 still lives ; and we. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Flemings, 
 we can boast that we, alone of the great nations of Europe, 
 still keep that old Teutonic tongue in its most ancient 
 /shape.^ I will not say, as I have heard it hinted, that 
 High-Dutch is simply English mispronounced by Slaves ; 
 but I will say that High-Dutch is simply Low-Dutch with 
 its ancient sounds strangely changed by somebody. We 
 still eat and dirink ; they still eat and d.rink in Holland, 
 in Friesland, in the elder Saxony, in Sweden, in Norway, 
 in Iceland ; in High-Dutchland they have taken to 
 such very modern processes as those of e^^e7i and irinJcen. 
 That old Teutonic tongue we have never exchanged for 
 
 ^ No philologer -will, I suppose, deny that the Low-Dutch forms of words 
 are older than the High-Dutch. But the notion that English is " derived " 
 from " German " is still so very common among those who are not philologers, 
 that it is needful specially to insist on the fact that English, as a Low-Dutch 
 dialect, really represents an older stage of the Teutonic speech than High- 
 Dutch. 
 
II.] IN GAUL AND BRITAIN. Ill 
 
 any other ; we have not done as the Gaul did when he 
 exchanged his speech for that of Eome, as the Briton of 
 Cornwall — if I may speak of Britons in Cornwall — did 
 when he exchanged his speech for that of England. Into 
 that abiding tongue many a word has crept in from foreign 
 sources ; but the true life of the tongue has never been 
 sapped ; the fount of English undefiled has never been 
 dried up. For every end highest and holiest, dearest 
 and most needful, the folk of England still speak the 
 living tongue of Hengest and Cerdic. When the English- 
 man kneels before his God, when he bows before his king, 
 when he weds his bride, when he greets his friend, when 
 he welcomes his child into the world or follows his father 
 to the grave, he still speaks the speech of the old days and 
 needs not to borrow a word from any tongue beyond the 
 sea. The law of England is still the old law, the law 
 which our fathers brought with them ; it has changed 
 indeed not a little through the growth of other laws 
 beside it, but it has never been put aside for the law 
 of any other people. It has never fared as when in other 
 lands the elder law has given way to the law of Rome, 
 the law of Arabia, or the law of England itself. These 
 are truths which we must set forth over and over again, in 
 season and out of season ; they are truths which are the 
 first of truths in English history; nay they are more than 
 the first of truths in English history; they are the very 
 life and soul of the past history and the present being of 
 the still abiding English folk. 
 
 No nation is wholly pure ; no language is wholly un- 
 mixed. The English nation, the English language, are 
 mixed as all others are, but our blood is not more mixed 
 than the blood of every nation must be which has played 
 an equally great part in the history of the world. The 
 vocabulary of our language has received a vast infusion 
 of foreign words ; but, under the circumstances of its 
 history, it shows its abiding strength that it only received 
 a vast infusion of foreign words, and was not altogether 
 
112 TEUTONIC CONQUEST. 
 
 exchanged for a foreign tongue. We are not a Muchvolk 
 in the same sense as our French neighbours, who draw their 
 blood from one set of sources, who draw their language 
 from another, and their name and their political history 
 from a third.^ "We are nothing like so mixed as the Italian 
 or the Spaniard, with his national being made nip of every 
 race that Rome ever conquered and every race that ever 
 conquered Rome. We are not more mixed than our High- 
 Dutch kinsfolk. The Celtic element in England can hardly 
 be so great as the Slavonic element is in Germany, and 
 there must be a Celtic element in Germany too. We 
 bow to the superior purity of the Dane, the Swede, and the 
 Norwegian ; but their purity, only comparative after all, is 
 bought at the price of having, in later times at least, played 
 a less part in the history of Europe than the Englishman, 
 the Frenchman, or the German. 
 
 I have made my protest ; I have made my answer, so far 
 as an answer can be made where there is really no question. 
 I must now go back to the long and slow, I will not say 
 weary, path on which I have entered. I have to make my 
 way by the speech, the laws, the deeds, of Merwings and of 
 KarHngs to the speech, the laws, the deeds of them who 
 came from the first England in the keels of Hengest and 
 iElle, and who have borne from the second England to the 
 thirdj the speech of -Alfred with the amendments of Robert 
 Manning, the laws of King Eadward with the amendments 
 of King William. 
 
 ^ I have worked this out more fully in Historical Essays, iii. 207. 
 
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