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so evident a truth, it is idle to contend; and those who believe great part of our language to be borrowed from the Welsh, may doubtless infer that great part of our population is derived from the same source.' Yet he shows that some Britons remained who were in a state of freedom, since a law provided that a Briton who held five hydes of land should be raised, like a ceorl, to the dignity of thane; though even these free Britons were valued at less, in assigning the composition for their lives, than the meanest Saxon freemen. Of the slaves, whose large numbers he recognises, Hallam says that they may be presumed, at least in early times, to be Britons. "For though his own crimes, or the tyranny of others, might possibly reduce a Saxon ceorl to this condition, it is inconceivable that the lowest of those who won England with their swords should, in the establishment of new kingdoms, have been left destitute of personal liberty." It should be added, as a point of great importance, that as the children of a female serf to a free father, or even to an unknown father, were by Saxon law free-not, as elsewhere, slaves-there must have been a tendency to rapid diminution in the number of slaves, relatively at least to the number of freemen.

With regard to the evidence derived from language, it appears to me that, while unmistakably the language has been Teutonic in form and substance, from the time of the Saxon conquest, we could not thence infer that the great bulk of the population was Saxon, at

the time when Green says all were Saxon. When a nation has been dispossessed by a conquering race, but large numbers of the conquered remain either in servitude or in subjection, there are for awhile two languages. Convenience so manifestly dictates the desirability of a single language, that usually one or other of the two disappears in the course of a few generations, or even in the course of a single generation. The question, which language will disappear, depends in part on the quality of the two languages, in part on the completeness of the conquest and the character of the conquering people. We can very well understand that the Teutonic languages would yield to the Latin of the Roman Empire: first, because of the superior qualities of this tongue and its association with literature; and secondly, because the 'Teutonic languages were many and diverse, the Latin Kin those early days) one and wide-spread. But in Great Britain, where Latin had not dispossessed the British language, the Saxon language could hardly fail to become the dominant tongue, the Britons who remained in England being utterly vanquished. There was little, either in the quality of the British language, or in the position of the British people (in England itself), to give the British tongue a chance of becoming the language of ordinary intercourse. Many British words might remain in use, especially words relating to such occupations as the British serfs would be engaged in, or to the articles which they chiefly used. But they would have to pick up and

adopt as quickly as possible the language of their masters. It would be as reasonable to assert that there is no Negro blood in the present population of America, because no words of the African language are used in America, as to infer that the Britons were wholly exterminated because English has been the language of the country since the time of the Saxon conquest.

Thus the prevalence of the English tongue, even so early as the sixth century, proves in reality nothing respecting the relative population of Saxons and Britons in this English-speaking community. But for certain accidental relations which compelled the Angevin kings of this country to place their chief reliance on English armies, and to adopt a tone to Englishmen very different from that of the Norman conquerors, our language would probably have been far more French than English by this time, incomplete though the Norman conquest of the Saxons and Danes was, compared with the Saxon conquest of the Britons. I am well aware that our language never became very largely Normanised even in words, and that its structure underwent scarce any appreciable change. But the opportunities for effecting a change were few, and lasted but a short time. Even the Norman kings were compelled to direct their atten

1 Yet we owe some characteristic peculiarities of our tongue to the French,-as, for instance, the loss of several forms of inflection which still remain in the Continental branches of the Teutonic language.

tion largely to France; and though in their time the English-speaking population was held in contempt, it was unsafe to attempt to dispossess the English language. From the time of John, matters changed so completely that, in the course of three generations, even the Norman nobles were proud to be called Englishmen. Yet even under these altered conditions, some in England feared, so late as the fourteenth century, that French would dispossess English in this country; and, indeed, some thought that the English language had already been greatly impaired. An Englishman, in 1385, wrote as follows on this point:"By commyxtion and mellynge first with Danes & afterwards with Normans, in meny the contry longage is apayred" (corrupted). "This apayrynge of the burth of the tunge is bycause of tweie things: oon is for children in scole agenst the usuage and maner of all other nations, beeth compelled for to leve hire own longage, and for to construe hir lessons and here thynges in French, and so they haveth sethe Normans come first into Engelond. Also gentlemen children beeth taught to speke Frensche from the tyme that they beeth roked in here cradel, and konneth speke and play with a childe's broche; and uplondissche men will lykne hymself to gentilmen, and fondeth with great besynesse for to speak Frensche to be told of."

But in truth, the best evidence respecting the relative numbers of Britons and Saxons is not that derived from the imperfect and often untrustworthy

records of the Saxon conquest, nor that from philological considerations. In these days, departments of science which were once scarcely thought to be connected in any way with history, throw important light on many historical questions of great interest and difficulty. We have learned to recognise in the complexion, figure, brain-conformation, and moral characteristics of a race, the qualities of their progenitors. We do not admit now the possibility that in so short a space of time as forty generations, for instance, a fairhaired people should become dark-haired; that a blueeyed race should become dark-eyed; or that a race like the Saxons who followed Hengist, Ella, and Cerdic, whether we consider their physical or their moral characteristics, should become such a race as we now recognise in this country. When we consider this form of evidence, we are compelled to reject utterly the belief that we are descended from a race either purely English (including Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Danes), or in the main English. As Professor Huxley has said, though the Teutonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing forms of speech, "the people are vastly less Teutonic than their language." To call the present inhabitants of Britain Anglo-Saxon is as absurd, he adds, "as the habit of talking of the French people as a Latin race, because they speak a language which is in the main derived from Latin." The psychological evidence points the same way as the ethnological. Many of the most important characteristics of Englishmen are derived