'S^^-aai^y 3 9002 06445 £^r:J^'u'^ -^^ ^¥^^'''^'Wi^ w^Xii>- The genius of Anglo-Saxon law and history ^^^^''^f-"'^-'''' compared with the civilization of Latin Imperialism. Rev .TJftn, T.Gibson, Utica, 1888. 1 "^ Jfr- 'i ¦ • rn.dM— 0 iforthjefiiMnii^ of fC»^jlgi Wihti Colotif «Y^LE«¥]Mn¥EI^SnirY' o iLniBi^^iEif " The Genius of Anglo-Saxon Law and History compared wrrH the civilization of LATIN IMPERIALISM. AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE ONEIDA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, BY THE editor OP THE CHURCH ECLECTIC. 3tia e^intintn nostrae ffiitiittttio— Cicero. PCJBLISHKD BY REQUEST OP THE SOCIETY. UTICA, N. Y. : L. C. Chjlds & Son, Printers and Book-Bindeks, 33-35 Charlotte St.. Historv is written in vain, if mankind have not been taught that Demagogue and Tyrant are synonymous terms : and that he who professes to be the friend of the people while he persuades them to sacrifice their reason to (heir passions, their duty to their caprices, their laws, their constitution, their glory, their integrity, to the mere lust of tyran nical misrule, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. Hon. HUGH S. LEGARE. I, I GO m^^ THE GENIUS OF ANGLO-SAXON LAW AND INSTITU TIONS CONTRASTED WITH THE LATIN CIVIL IZATION OF IMPERIALISM. An Address before the Oneida Historical Society, at its March meeting IN Utica, 1888, By the Editor of the "Church Eclectic." Gentlemen of the Oneida Historical Society : THE subjedl upon which I have been announced to address you this evening, is too vast to be thoroughly handled in anything less than a systematic and bulky treatise. I can only, hope to pre sent a few points by way of suggestion to those who would like to extend their reading further in the same dire6lion. As announced,. the subjeft would appear to have to do solely with the past: but we- are always to remember that the present condition of the world, or the condition of society at any given time, is the direft and logical outcome of what has gone before it. And this subjeft especially, is. one that concerns the proper understanding of that state of society and that chara6ler of institutions under which we are living. I suppose every one knows what is implied in Anglo-Saxon Law and Institutions, as a system and a spirit that never took their rise in any province of the ancient Roman Empire; neverVere affefled to any sensible degree by the traditional ideas of the ancient impe rialism. But it may be well to call to mind that what is meant by Latin civilzation is simply that which has been developed in the- various countries of Europe which once formed part of the ancient Roman Empire, or were included in that successor to it which Charlemagne and Otto the Great rehabilitated under the nameof the "Holy Roman Empire," a name not formally abandoned until 1806. In all these countries, the Corpus furls Civilis, as codified by the Emperor Justinian, formed the basis of all law, whether of persons or things, and has continued to furnish the main principles of their modern legislation, including even the Code Napoleon. The essence of Latin Civilization is Imperialism : hence the education of Latin civilization never tended to prepare a people for any alternative to despotism but Socialism, Communism, or Nihilism. The combina tion of authority with personal liberty has always been a difficult problem under the Civil Law. The State and the Head of the State being paramount, the individual occupies no other position than that of a subje6l or ward ofthe State: and the only natural reaftion from such principles of government is Socialism, which, on the same principle of exalting society above the individual, hands over all individual rights and interests to a public and official manage ment. The new German Empire is an illustration of both these extremes, perhaps ambitious to take up the inheritance of the old Holy Roman Empire where Bonaparte ended it, by its absolutism of Blut tind Risen, and by its Socialist propaganda. The Anglo-Saxon Common Law on the other hand, with its sense of the sacredness of personal liberty, the obligation of private conscience, the inviolability of individual rights, is the system that was transferred to this continent, and underlies the legislation of all our States, except perhaps Louisiana, which inherited the Code Napoleon. With this prefatory statement I may hope that the drift may be more apparent of the rather fragmentary and disjointed considera tions that my limited time has allowed me to throw together on this subjeft: I can only ask acknowledgment of another principle, that in the setting forth of great general laws or charafteristics, on so wide a field as history, apparent exceptions may only be a stronger proof of the rule. I hope I shall not give any ground for the charge of Anglomania more positive than that afforded by the late Mr. Emerson in his "English Traits," where he says that "if there be one successful country in the universe during the last millennium, 'that country is England," and that "the American is only the continuation and introduftion of the English genius into new conditions more or less propitious," — a statement to which the London Daily Telegraph has applied the expression so frequently in Talleyrand's mouth, " C'etait un flatteur!' It is matter of common observation that our country is rapidly filling up with foreign populations, largely from the continental countries of Europe. We have a just confidence, grounded upon historical experience, in the wonderful assimilating powers of Anglo-Saxon language, law and institutions, — but in a country where political power is based chiefly on numbers, I suppose these things are not wholly beyond the modifying if not revolutionary influence of alien ideas and habits of thought, whether in the departments of religion, or literature, or social and political science. Under such circumstances, it may not be unprofitable for us Americans to be reminded occasionally, as the Children of Isrkel were often exhorted by their great prophets and teachers, to " look unto the Rock from whence they were hewn : " not to forget the grand principles illustrated in their own history, upon which their whole system of government was founded — not to betray or suffer to be lost those essential ideas which through all the obstacles and conflicts of the past, have resulted in placing the English-speaking nations in the forefront of all that can be called civilization on this globe to-day. Of course it would be an interesting subje6l to study — the phe nomena of the present day in the mingling and fusing of races over such large areas of the world, and the resulting modification of their inherited chara6teristics and ideas, under the enormous influence of the great improvements in physical science and the mechanical facil ities of intercourse and transportation. But my thesis is concerned with some racial chara61:eristics and ideas of our own English stock which it is certainly desirable to preserve and continue in our mod ern civilization, whatever other changes it is destined to undergo. I have been accustomed to feel, in looking back at the early history of these Colonies, and at the kind of material with which the primaeval wildernesses of this continent were first subdued, that the republic of the new world is the rightful heir of all the glorious history of the Anglo-Saxon race — of all its triumphs in law and free government, in religion and social development, and especially in its incomparable literature: that Shakspeare, and Spenser, and Milton, were ours too, as well as Sir Walter Raleigh, and the other heroes of that golden age of Elizabeth, who left their very names upon the geography of this land. The Colonial nomenclature of the whole region along the.Atlantic slope of the AUeghanies, in cities and counties and townships, as well as States, is full of the events and associations of English his tory. In those days when we had a "Church without a Bishop," and before we had a " State without a king," it was an English Dean, born in Ireland, and afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, who became so enthusiastic over the new world, that he fairly sacrificed himself for it, by what Walpole regarded as a mere visionary educational project, when he came over and spent several years at Newport, where he finally left his farm and library towards the foundation of Yale College. He it was who sung in lines that have been perhaps more frequently quoted than many others that could claim a less doubtful charafler as poetry: Westward the course of Empire takes its way. I suppose there is hardly a lawyer that has read anything back of the Code or the Revised Statutes, who would not admit that even these have to be judicially construed in accordance with rules and principles of the Common Law, that extend back, as Blackstone has it, " time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the con trary" — that English and American Courts appeal to common sources of Law in their judicial determinations, and that in law and political science we have simply developed and simplified what our fathers brought with them. Even what we call "the Revolution" was in no sense such as those movements to which that name is attached in continental countries. It was not an overturning of the foundations of society. It was what, I think De Tocqueville has called a "diplomatic revolution" — that is, the issue was wholly with a ministry for the time being which usurped powers of government that did not belong to them. Our fathers contended for rights which they knew belonged to them under the English law and con stitution. When they cried, " no taxation without representation," 6 they contended for a principle of Anglo-Saxon liberty as old ais Magna Charta, or the laws of King Alfred ; a principle that was in operation, in the Saxon Witan or Wittenagemotes long before the Norman Conquest, while the Franks and the Normans and the German successors of Charlemagne, were carrying on what Milton called the " battle pf Kites and Crows," between Emperor and Kings, and Kings and Dukes, and these with other subordinate feudal chiefs of all degrees of petty territorial power or influence. It has been said,, truly as forcibly, that the original Constitution of these United States is, in its essence, little more than the Magna Charta of the 13th century with the Bill of Rights of the 17th century superadded. The right of the commons to a voice in legis lation, the right of trial by jury, of "putting oneself upon the coun try" in all issues of person or property, the writ of habeas corpus, the being put in jeopardy of life or limb but once for the same ofifence, these and many other such principles bedded like rock in ' the very substratum of our social existence, have, through long ages, furnished the foundation for the magnificent superstrufture of this land and this XlXth century. Other republics on this continent may in imitation take over the same external form, and the same nominal machinery, but they have not had the same history, the same education, the same race in short, with the same ideas and hereditary spirit ingrained into its blood. It is not possible to construft a government and social sys tem like a building with rapid accretions of brick and naortar. It is not possible to purchase and transfer a national spirit like a com modity. It must be like the growth of a majestic tree, whose branches seem to kiss the sky, while all is developed from one trunk and root and one principle of life unseen and unknown, except through its outward manifestation. It is not merely of the English- language, but of English institutions, of English law and liberty, that the roots can be traced back almost to the prehistoric age of the Aryan race. At all events the essential spirit or ethos that underlies our history can be recognised in the description which the Roman historian, Tacitus, gives of those Teutonic barbarians who never succumbed to the dominion of the Latin Empire, and who were the immediate ancestors of those tribes which wiped out the partially Romanised inhabitants of the British Isles, and com pletely changed what was first called Britain into what is now called England. There has been nothing so persistent in this world, except Chris tianity, as the tongue and the spirit of the original Anglo-Saxon race. It is saidthatyou cannot write a French sentence withoutputting in a Romance or Latin derived word. It is perfedlly easy, as I believe Governor Seymour often recommended, to writ:e any num ber of sentences in pure Saxon English without a single Latinized or Norman French expression. Examples in abundance are found in our English Bible: ^ "Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, 1 The percentage of Saxon words has been calculated as follows : In the English B^ble, 97 : Swift, 89 : Shakspeare, 85 : Addison, 83 : Spenser and MUton, 8l : Dr. Johnson> 75 : Gibbon, 58. neither do they reap, nor gather into barns : yet your heavenly Father feedeth them : " or that sentence of rugged strength which I quoted at the outset: or even of a later day, that sentence in Lord Chatham's speech to the electors of Middlesex, which illustrates the very point of this Essay, the independent sense of the sacred ness of personal individual rights which constitutes the very differ entia of the Teutonic race from the nations of Latin descent: — " Every Englishman's house is his stronghold, which though the winds may whistle through, and the rains of heaven may enter it, yet the King of England cannot!" That was a principle that the ancient democracies, any more than the Roman and mediaeval despotisms, knew nothing about. These latter would hardly have been capable of understanding it, where for ages the maxim of Civil Law was that the source of all law is in the will of the Emperor — 'Voluntas Imperatoris. How different the old maxim of Teutonic law, "The King can do no wrong:" so often demagogic ally quoted in an opposite sense. Any violation of law puts the king so far forth in the position of a private individual, just as it does the priest or bishop transcending his powers : and renders his unlawful aft null and void, ab initio — binding on nobody. That is a principle peculiar to the sturdy race from which we are descended, and was unknown to Latin civilization. The civil Ruler has no right to do wrong, is its meaning, and even Henry Vlllth, who had so hard work to keep within the laws of England, by which so many of his predecessors had been brought to book, as well as several of his successors, was on impregnable ground when he took the stand that the Bishop of Rome had no right to dispense from the Law cf God. Even our Puritan fathers, genuine Englishmen all of them, when, as is said, at the first town meeting ever held in New Haven, they passed a resolution to " be governed by the laws of God, until they got time to make better ones," (meaning, of course, the Mosaic civil Statutes,) announced the same old principle of the Saxon Wittenagemot, that they must be governed by law, and that it must be law recognized as such by the common reason and con science. And this, I believe, is the very definition given of law by the classic English writer on Law himself: " Law is the expression of the public reason : " and no law or statute can long stand that finds the public reason and conscience arrayed against it. The rec onciliation of Liberty and Law is the grand triumph oi our heredi tary civilization: the realiz£ttionofthat glorious climax which unfolded itself before the vision of our great classic theologian of the age of Elizabeth, when he wrote these now familiar, but immortal words : " Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world : all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power." And this is as true in the world of moral consciousness and a6lion, as it is now recognized and understood and obeyed, too, wherever men wish to succeed, in the world of physical science. Hallam opens his great work on the Constitutional History of England with the following sentence : " The Government of England in all times recorded by history has been one of those mixed or limited monarchies which the Keltic and Gothic tribes appear uni versally to have established in preference to the coarse despotism of Eastern Nations, to the more artificial tyranny of 'Rome and Con stantinople, or to the various models of republican polity which were tried upon the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea . . . Eng land more fortunate than the rest {i. e. than the Roman or Latinized nations of Continental Europe, which had inherited the language and law of Rome), had acquired by the 15th century a just reputa tion for the goodness of her laws and the security of her citizens from oppression." He then goes on to show how far back in his tory the essential present Constitution of the English Parliament as representing all orders in the State, and as limiting and pra6lically controlling the monarchy, extends. In this sentence will be recognized at least a glimpse of my thesis, the " Differential Elements of Anglo-Saxon Law and Civilization," though he does not, either in this work, or in his " Middle Ages," follow up the comparison of English and Continental ideas. He uses the words "Gothic or Keltic" indeed, in a wide or loose sense; for even if we may allow the term Gothic to the Danish and Scan dinavian Northmen who invaded and settled in England and France, nothing is more certain than that the Keltic element as such had little or no part in the origin of the English language and institutions. It will be fifty years ago this season since I heard a Professor of a Medical College (the late Dr. Coventry, of this city), tell his class that the Science of Medicine had made greater progress in the pre vious thirty years than in thirty centuries before. If that were so then, what would he say now? — perhaps that people die all the same. But we claim similar progress for almost all departments of knowl edge. History is one that has profited no less than most others by modern research. Gibbon's work indeed pretty well holds its own as a wonderful monument of learning and original investigation for the century in which it was written. But early English history was only a confused mass of superficial guess-work, like Mosheim's his tory of Christianity, until there arose the modern school of docu mentary research, represented by such men as Sir Francis Palgrave, Profs. Haddan and Stubbs, E. A. Freeman, and John R. Green, who have shown that a History of the English People exhibits far more of what was the " Making of England " than any mere annals of its kings, whether of the Saxon Heptarchy, so-called, or of the succes sive Norman, Angevin or Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanove rian lines of sovereigns. Men of this new school might have taken for their motto the first sentence in the Preface of Mr. Hildreth's very able History of the United States — a history that might, like Hallam's, be fairly called a Constitutional History: " Of Fourth of July orationsand semi-centen nial sermons in the guise of History, we have had more than enough." Mr. Hume, for instance, did not seem to know that there ever had been any such thing as Christianity in Britain, until about the time of the Saxon invasion, when he alludes to some disputes in the the ological world, and mentions incidentally among the ravages of the heathen newcomers, their destruftion of churches and monasteries. Yet we know S. Alban suffered martyrdom at Verulam in the Dio cletian persecution in 304: that Constantine the Great, if not born at York, as William of Malmesbury puts it, yet set out on his vic torious career as an "Augustus" from that place, where his father died in 306: that three British Bishops attended the Council of Aries in the South of France in 314: and that the famous heresi arch, Pelagius, who set all Christendom by the ears, in the days of S. Augustine, or the beginning of the sth century, was a Briton, that is to say, a Welshman, by the name of Morgan. The Roman Empire made little impression upon the German tribes before the time of the Frankish monarchy. Julius Caesar had enough to do to keep the Germans out of Gaul, and the viftory of Arminius, or Herrman, over the legions of Varus in the year 9, was a vi6lory that belonged to our Saxon ancestry as well, and prevented Roman law and civilization from becoming the chief moulding element in English history, as they were in the subsequent history of conti nental nations. Britain was one of the last of the Roman conquests, and that conquest was in no sense a real conquest until a hundred years after Julius Caesar's time, that is, during the reign of Claudius. who overcame Caraftacus, or Caradoc, the British or Keltic chief The revolt of Boadicea and the viftory of Suetonius, was in the reign of Nero. Julias Agricola built his line of forts from Clyde to the Firth of Forth in 81, while Hadrian afterwards built his wall from Carlisle to the mouth of the Tyne, against those Piftish tribes of Caledonia who never could be brought under the Roman dominion. But during the whole period until the Roman power evacuated the country in the year 410, their occupation was chiefly in fortified towns or camps {castra), the traces of which remain, not only in unmistakable ruins of Roman masonry, and the roads which con- nedled these places, like Watling Street and the Fosse Way, but also in the names still adhering to the towns that have been rebuilt on their sites, such as Chester, Winchester, Leicester, Gloucester, and generally all those whose names end in that syllable ceaster (for castrci). Now the main thesis of Prof Freeman's work on " The Norman Conquest," in which perhaps he shows an ardour and eagerness of style, hardly suitable to the judicial character of a historian, is two fold : first to show that the Teutonic conquest of the Keltic Britons, partially Romanized as they were, was altogether unlike the Frank ish conquest of Gaul, or the Gothic conquest of Spain, in which the conquerors were so merged with the conquered, as to have their language and customs entirely modified and leavened with the elements of Roman civilization — Roman law, Roman literature and IO the religion of Christianity as affefted by these elements. The Romance languages of the Continent, as signified by the very word, were the result of fusing the invaders with the native population, by which the conquerors were conquered themselves, through the pow erful means of the religion and the civil law of .Rome under which they remain to this day. His other point is to show that the Nor- riian Conquest was more like these latter — not a revolution, but a turning point in English history — that the Normans, who had been in France for but two or three generations, and were already allied by blood 'and descent to the English, instead of supplanting and driving out the English people, were merged into them, adopted their whole constitution and system of laws, and by the time of the Angevin Kings thoroughly became Englishmen themselves, as had the Danes before them. It is this fa6l which proves what is the main purpose of this Essay, that there is something in the Teutonic blood, habits of thought, and civil institutions, from the days of Tacitus down, entirely different from and alien to those of both the great Eastern and Western Empires, which under the name of what we now call the Civil Law, par excellence, the fus Civile, made the will of an Emperor, the fountain and san6lion of all law. That something is the secret of the modern development of English history, of the love of personal liberty, the sacredness of Domestic relations, that is, of the Home, which no other language gives us — the equality of all before the laws, the personal accountability to God, the independent spirit of enterprise and adventure which have created a commercial charafter that distinguishes the English-speaking peoples above the rest of the world. This race, when it came in such detachments as weie called Angles, Jutes and Saxons, into Britain, made a conquest like no other in Europe. It was a complete wiping out or driving off of the native British or Keltic population, with all their Roman improve ments or acquisitions — their very language as well as their religion disappearing out of the whole region settled by the invaders, behind the fastnesses of Wales, the highlands of Scotland, the peat bogs of Ireland, or the sand dunes of Armorica or "Brittany" in Gaul. It was not a conquest so much as an extermination. It was like Tacitus' pregnant phrase, Faciunt solitudinem, pacem appellant. But they settled in this wilderness and they began a new nation and a new history whose records are not yet ended. As Prof Freeman says in his Norman Conquest: A more fearful blow never fell on any nation than the landing of the Angles and Saxons was to the Celt of Britain . But we may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity of our forefathers. Had we stayed in our earlier land, we should have remained undistinguished from the mass of our Low Dutch kinsfolk. Had we conquered and set tled only as Goths and Burgundians conquered and settled, we should be simply one more member of the gieat family of the Romance nations. Had we been a colony sent forth only, after the mother country had attained to any degree of civilization, we might have been lost like the Normans in Sicily, or the Franks in Palestine. As it was we were a colony sent forth while our race was still in a state of healthy barbarism. The Goth is merged in the Romance population of Italy, Spain and Aquitaine : the Old Saxon has lost his national being through the subtler proselytism of the High German ; but the II Angles, Saxons and Jutes, transplanted to the shores of Britain, have won for themselves a new name and a national being, and have handed on to us the distindl and glorious inheritance of Englishmen. Our Saxon English ancestors were indeed savage, ruthless heathens, worshippers of Woden and Thunder. M. Taine, in his remarkably successful book on English Literature, seems to take a French relish in describing them : Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair, ravenous istomachs filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks: of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to brutal drunkenness : pirates at first : of all kinds of hunting the man-hunt most profitable and most noble. They dashed to sea in their two- -Sailed barks, landed anywhere, killed everything : and having sacrificed in honor of their gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind them the red light of their burnings, went farther on to begin again. But after all this cheerful description which he draws out at some length, he seems to discern certain qualities not found in other races : Under this native barbarism there were noble dispositions unknown to the Roman world, which were destined to produce a better people out of its ruins. In the first place a certain earnestness which leads them out of frivolous sentiments to noble ones . . . no less capable of self-denial than of independence. . . . Through all outbreaks of primitive brutality gleams obscurely the grand idea of duty, which is, the self-consjraint in view of some noble end. . . . They thought there was something sacred in a woman : they married but one, and kept faith with her. In fifteen centuries the idea of marriage is unchanged with them. As Tacitus says, the wife gives herself altogether — •one body, one life with him — no thought beyond — will suffer and dare, as his sole com panion in peace or war. He catches a glimpse of the sublime in his dreams — his religion is already within, as it will be in the i6th century — the world is a warfare, and heroism (the highest good. " In Homer the warrior often gives way, and is not blamed if he flees for his life." It was Aristophanes who first perpetrated that joke: " He who fights and runs away. May live to fight another day." Not so is it in the Sagas of the North — " in Germany the coward is drowned in the mud under a hurdle." The Saxon cares not for his blood or his life. They always fought as Harold and his huscarles fought at the battle of Senlac to the last man, or as the six hundred at the charge of Balaclava, or as Pidlon's and Maitland's brigades fought at Waterloo. There may be something fanciful and poetical in Taine's pi6lure: but it cannot be denied that there is such a thing as race charafler- istics in the family of mankind, and the races that never in any way were touched bythe powers of those age-long empires of Rome and Byzantium, could not but develope some traits and principles sui-generis in histoiy. I am well aware that Guizot calls the statement of Tacitus in regard to the Teutonic honor of woman, a chimera; and says the sentiment of reverence for woman arose in the feudal system ; but he elsewhere admits that the feudal system itself was the offspring of German ideas and society. It is not Tacitus alone who refers to this peculiarity. Julius Caesar in his campaigns in Gaul, observed that the Germans would not even engage in battle without consult ing their women. Christianity goes to all races alike. Its glory is that it carries that which appeals to and finds lodgment in every human soul. But, as in the examples of Jewish history, religion itself takes on a 12 Specific chara6ler in the modes of its expression and its application to individual life, from the inherent traits of race and ancestry.. And the religion of Christianity found in the Anglo-Saxon race a soil in which its principles of personal individual responsibility and the sovereign supremacy of individual conscience as distinguished from all mere external cults, took the deepest root in all Christen dom. National autonomy in all matters civil and religious, is a principle that crops out in Anglo-Saxon history all along from the days of Edwine, and Baeda, and Alfred, and Athelstan, and Edward,, as well as in the Barons of Runnymede, the conflifl of Henry with Becket, in Wyclif and the Lollards, in the various statutes of Pro- visors and Premunire which Henry VIII. had nothing to do but revive and appeal to as carrying out the ancient policy of the realm. It was a long process of several centuries that turned our heathera ancestors into Christians. But Christian, and intensely Christian,, England became, as early as the reign of Alfred, and even before the so-called Heptarchy was merged into one kingdom. It was the Englishman Alcuin that Karl the Great sent for to help him organize the European chaos. It was the unity of the Church in England that forged the unity of the State, and led to the formation of one IVitan, or Parliament for the whole. As early as 668 England was divided into parishes and dioceses by Archbishop Theodore, and the present system of endowments by tithes begun. All this too, in spite of the outbreaks of heathenism' like that of Penda, the heathen king of Middle England or Mercia, who slew five Christian kings, and was at last himself slain at the battle of Wingfield in 65 5 , that settled forever the question of Woden or Christ And England remained Christian too, in spite of the overwhelming incursions of heathen Danes and Northmen, to the extent of her final conquest by them under Knut; for all these were converted and absorbed into the English stock, as the Normans were afterward. But I cannot help thinking that Prof Freeman in his account of the gradual conversion of the English or Anglo-Saxons to Christi anity, gives too exclusive credit to what he calls the "special mission from the common ecclesiastical centre " which was then the centre of civilization, after Constantinople. When that mission came into Kent in 596, within a year or two it held a conference- with seven Christian Bishops and a large number of clergy, on the Severn, in the West of England, who refused to put themselves in connection with it; and but a few years after, in 607, a heathen Northumbrian king slew no less than 2,000 Welsh Christians of Bangor, in a battle at Chester on the Dee. However much legendary or mythical matter there may be in the Welsh Triads, there is a substratum of historical truth. Christianity came into Ireland prob ably from Gaul, at a time when missionaries had little reference to^ any "ecclesiastical centre." S. Patrick in Ireland, S. David and S. Asaph in Wales, and S. Mungo and S. Ninian in Scotland, are names of Christian missionaries laboring long before the arrival of Augustin, some of them before the Saxon conquest of Britain. 13 Long before the missionaries of Kent had niade much impression north of the Thames, Northern and Middle England had been largely evangelised by a succession of British, or Welsh or Scots missionaries. S. Patrick and S. Ninian date back to the time of S. Martin of Tours, before the Saxons came to England. S. Patrick's labors in Ireland led to the foundation of that famous missionary centre of S. Columba on the west coast of Scotland, the Island of lona, or as it is named from him Icolmkill, whose ruins and runic cross are still the objeft of Christian veneration. This place fur nished sun6luary to a Northumbrian prince and sent him back to help on the Christianizing of Northern England. Those who have read Mr. Green's History of the English People, have not forgotten the beautiful piftures he draws of that long succession of faithful, self-sacrificing men that came forth from S. Columba's school and founded that other great centre of Lindisfarne, from whence Christian missionary work radiated almost to the Thames in the South, and the personal traits of such true men of God as S. Aidan, S. Finan, S. Colman, S. Cuthbert and S. Chad, whose names are yet enshrined in some ofthe churches and Cathedrals they founded. The author of Footprints of our Fathers very truly says : From the 6th to the loth century Banchor and Lindisfarne contained a race of scholars who protested alike against continental di6lation and Augustinian predestination : who upheld Greek learning and philosophic speculation when these were almost extincft: at Canterbury and York, asserting the freedom o^ the will, believing in the existence of the- Antipodes, by far the best astronomers of their time, who as they pondered over the pages of Martianus Capella, well-nigh anticipated the theory of Copernicus. Irish missionaries penetrated over the Continent of Europe, wit ness such names as S. Gall in Switzerland, and the Convent of S. Columbanus at Bobbio, in Lombardy, besides many others in Gaul and Brittany. It is not to be wondered at that British Christians were slow to have any dealings with what they regarded as such irreclaimable savages as the heathen Saxons, but when these did yield at last to Christian influences, they ceased their work of extermination and took up that of government and administration, and sought to bring all under a uniform system of law and order. Of course while I thus exalt the charafter of early English and Welsh missionaries, I do not thereby subscribe to the mediaeval system of canonization, which seems to have been governed by ref erence to partisan services, rather than personal merit. What are we to think of a Kalendar that puts down such a weak, narrow- minded, superstitious and disloyal charafter as " Edward the Con fessor," so-called, and leaves out Alfred the Great, whom Mr. Free man regards as positively the most perfeft charadler in history (not Divine) whether looked at as statesman, lawgiver, soldier, scholar or saint? John Adams, in his message on the death of Washington, took occasion to liken him to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. It would have been much higher honor to compare him to a Christian king like Alfred, even if he might be confessed to have fallen short of his model only as a scholar or as a saint. One feels that Alfred should have been the patron saint of England emblazoned on her banners instead of the mythical S. George, or the unpatriotic Edward. The same Kalendar puts in Thomas a Becket, the tool of a foreign usurpation, and passes over such men as Stephen Langton, the champion of liberty along with those barons who cried out, No- ¦lumus leges Anglice mutari : — and Robert Grostete, that model of a learned, high-minded, and loveable prelate, courageous and resolute in defending the liberties of the Anglican Church. Grostete was the preceptor of Roger Bacon, the friend and coun sellor of Simon de Montfort, and really one of the purest and bravest of the many true Englishmen who bore witness to the charafter of Bible religion as against the wickedness and corruption that was trying to dominate England from "the common ecclesiastical centre." Our American Church has simply done well in dropping the whole of the black letter calendar. One good thing was said by Pope Urban II. in the time of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, ¦and Henry I., showing that the Latin ecclesiastic had at that early day a true instin6live consciousness of the fundamental difference of Anglo-Saxon life and ideas from all the traditions of the Roman Empire. "That Metropolitan of England," said he, "will become Papa alterius orbis" — the Pope of another world, or a world by itself Could he have lived to this age, he would have felt that in that pro phetic utterance "he builded better than he knew." It would, of course, be a very tedious process to point out in detail all the characteristic differences between the institutions of the English Common Law and those of the Civil Law of the Roman Empire as digested in the Code and Pandefts and Novels of Justinian in the 6th century. The reforms which Constantine introduced into the government ¦of the Roman Empire might all be summed up in a single phrase, the Bureaucratic system ; — division of labor, and every department dire6tly accountable to the Emperor. The voluntas Imperatoris wdiS the fons et origo of all law as the temporal " Lord of the World :" and not only the principle of gradation in authority, but that of the sacredness of individual personal rights and liberties was hardly thought of The State was paramount in all respects and in all cir cumstances, and the citizen subjeft lived only for the State. Under this broad principle, all issues were tried on certain general rules of public equity, and the distinction between issues of faCt and issues of law was praCtically obscured or ignored. There was little or no idea of authority based upon a representation of the communis sensus •or will of the people, for the Corpus furis is chiefly made up of the rescripts and decrees of successive emperors in the course of history, just as the canon or ecclesiastical law grew in pretty much the same way under a similar system of imperialism. All indeed, as citizens, were in a sense equal before the law, but that means one thing in a system of despotism, quite another in a republic, or confederation of republics. As Dr. Bryce, an Oxford Professor of the Civil Law, in his able Tnonograph on the " Holy Roman Empire," which brought Teutonic IS Germany at last under Roman law, as well as the already Roman ized states of Southern and Western Europe, says of the system of imperialism ereCted by Julius Caesar and Augustus on the ruins of the republic: " The sacrifice of the individual to the mass, the concentration of all legislative and judicial powers in the person of the Sovereign, the centralization of the administrative system, the maintenance of order by a large ijiilitary force, the substitution of the influ ence of public opinion for the control of representative assemblies " — " where adminis tration is only too perfedl, and the pressure of social uniformity only too strong — these are taken as the salient chara,", * •',: ,frf!^a «' ' *^f^P^ S« ^^m^W"" /' ' ' . 'V^ff :'#- 1.> ' tf- ;ivl: J ' "V . , ; ^ ?:. , .^n > r ,, . ,. - ' .'t?'««f.'>"