I have spoken of them over and over again with my voice and with my pen, and I hope I may now take for granted what I have fully argued out elsewhere(26). I hope that I may be allowed to assume the plain facts of the case, without going through the details of every point. I will assume then—for it is that to which the question really comes—that England is England and that Englishmen are Englishmen. I will assume that we are not Romans or Welshmen, but that we are the descendants of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who came hither in the fifth and sixth centuries, of the Danes and Northmen who came hither in the ninth. I will assume that we are a people, not indeed of unmixed Teutonic blood—for no people in the world is of absolutely unmixed blood—but a people whose blood is not more mixed than that of any other nation; that Englishmen are as truly Englishmen as Britons are Britons or as High-Germans are High-Germans. I will assume that what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being; that whatever else we may have in us, whatever we have drawn from those whom we conquered or from those who conquered us, is no coordinate element, but a mere infusion into our Teutonic essence; in a word I will assume that Englishmen are Englishmen, that we are ourselves and not some other people. I assume all this; if any man disputes it, if any man chooses not to be an Englishman but to be a Welshman or a Roman, I cannot argue with him now; I can only ask him to turn to the arguments which I have urged on all those points in other times and places. I assume that, as we have had one national name, one national speech, from the beginning, we may be fairly held to have an unbroken national being. And when we find a Teutonic-speaking people in Britain living under the same political and social forms as the Teutonic-speaking people of the mainland, it is surely no very rash or far-fetched inference that the tongue and the laws which they have in common are a common possession drawn from a common source; that the island colony in short came itself, and brought its laws and language with it, from the elder mother-land beyond the sea.
Our fathers then came into Britain, and they brought with them the same primæval political system, the same distinctions of rank, the same division of political power, which they had been used to in their elder Anglian and Saxon homes. The circumstances of the Conquest would no doubt bring about some changes. It would probably tend to increase the numbers of the class of slaves. Such of the natives as were neither slain nor driven out would of course pass into that class. Especially, though there is no doubt that our forefathers brought their women with them from their own homes, there is no doubt that many British women passed into bondage, so much so that one of the common Old-English names for a female slave is Wylne or Welshwoman(27). And we may infer that this increased familiarity with slavery would tend to strengthen the custom by which freemen guilty of crimes were reduced to slavery by sentence of law. Again, I suspect that the circumstances of the Conquest did something to raise the position both of the common freeman and of the King or leader, as compared with the intermediate class of nobles. No two things are more levelling than colonization and successful warfare. The levelling effect of colonization is obvious; the levelling effect of warfare is not so obvious in modern times. In modern armies, where there is a strictly defined system of military ranks, where the distinction of officer and private is broadly drawn, where the private soldier is little more than a machine in the hands of his commander, the effect may even be the other way. But in an earlier state of things, where victory depends on the individual prowess of each man, nothing can be more levelling than warfare. Honour and profit fall to the lot of the stoutest heart and the strongest arm, whether their owner be noble or peasant in his own land. And this would be still more the case when war and colonization went hand in hand, when success brought not only victory but conquest, when men fought, not to go back loaded with glory and plunder to their old homes, but to win for themselves new homes as the reward of their valour. On the other hand, in an early state of things personal influence is almost everything; a vigorous and popular ruler is practically absolute, because no one has the wish to withstand his will, but a weak or unpopular ruler can exercise no authority whatever. In such a state of things as this no one can so easily gain the authority of unbounded influence as the military chief who leads his tribe to victory. And again, that influence would be increased tenfold when the successful chief led them not only to victory but to conquest, when he was not only a ruler but a founder, the man who had led his people to win for themselves a new land, to create a new state, the prize of his sword and of theirs. Mere nobility of birth, however highly honoured, would be but a feeble influence compared with either of these influences above and below it. I think that we may trace something of the results of these influences in the position of the oldest English nobility. That there was a difference between the noble and the common freeman, in Old-English phrase between the Eorl and the Ceorl(28), is shown by countless allusions to the distinction in our earliest records. But it is by no means easy to say what the distinction really was. And, as we shall presently see that this primitive nobility gradually gave way to a nobility of quite another kind and founded on quite another principle, we may perhaps be inclined to think that, at least after the settlement of the English in Britain, the privileges of the Eorlas were little more than honorary. I need hardly say that a traditional deference for high birth, a traditional preference for men of certain families in the disposal of elective offices, may go on when birth carries with it no legal privilege whatever. Nowhere has this been more strikingly shown than in those democratic Cantons of Switzerland of which I have already spoken. In a commonwealth where magistrates were chosen yearly, where every freeman had an equal vote in their choice, it still happened that, year after year, the representatives of certain famous houses were chosen as if by hereditary right. Such were the Barons of Attinghausen in Uri and the house of Tschudi in Glarus(29). And, whatever we say of such a custom in other ways, it was surely well suited to have a good effect on the members of these particular families; it was well suited to raise up in them a succession of men fitted to hold the high offices of the commonwealth. A man who knows that, if he be at all worthy of a certain post of honour, he will be chosen to it before any other man, but who also knows that, if he shows himself unworthy of it, he may either fail to attain it at all or may be peacefully removed from it at the end of any twelvemonth, is surely under stronger motives to make himself worthy of the place which he hopes to fill than either the man who has to run the chance of an unlimited competition or the man who succeeds to honour and authority by the mere right of his birth.
Our fathers then came into Britain, bringing with them the three elements of the primitive constitution which we find described by Tacitus; but as I am inclined to think, the circumstances of the Conquest did something, for a while at least, to strengthen the powers both of the supreme chief and of the general body of the people at the expense of the intermediate class of Eorlas or nobles. Let us first trace the origin and growth of the power of the supreme leader, in other words, the monarchic element, the kingly power. What then is a King? The question is much more easily asked than answered. The name of King has meant very different things in different times and places; the amount of authority attached to the title has varied greatly in different times and places. Still a kind of common idea seems to run through all its different uses; if we cannot always define a King, we at least commonly know a King when we see him. The King has, in popular sentiment at least, a vague greatness and sanctity attaching to him which does not attach to any mere magistrate, however high in rank and authority. I am not talking of the reason of the thing, but of what, as a matter of fact, has at all times been the popular feeling. Among the heathen Swedes, it is said that, when public affairs went wrong,—that is, in the state of things when we should now turn a Minister out of office and when our forefathers some generations back would have cut off his head,—they despised any such secondary victims, and offered the King himself in sacrifice to the Gods(30). Such a practice certainly implies that our Scandinavian kinsfolk had not reached that constitutional subtlety according to which the responsibility of all the acts of the Sovereign is transferred to some one else. They clearly did not, like modern constitution-makers, look on the person of the King as inviolable and sacred. But I suspect that the very practice which shows that they did not look on him as inviolable shows that they did look on him as sacred. Surely the reason why the King was sacrificed rather than any one else was because there was something about him which there was not about any one else, because no meaner victim would have been equally acceptable to the Gods. On the other hand—to stray for a moment beyond the range of Teutonic and even of Aryan precedent—we read that the ancient Egyptians forestalled the great device of constitutional monarchy, that their