the northern hordes. But when these
"men without a country" had fulfilled their obligation, they preferred
to remain in the fertile and attractive island rather than return to
their own vast forest stretches and there seek to combat the pressure
that had set in motion the Germanic peoples.

In this way began, in the fifth century, the conquest of Britain by
the Angles, the Jutes, and the Saxons: a conquest as inevitable as
it was beneficial; a conquest so stern as practically to sweep from
existence a whole people, excepting the women, who were spared to
become the slaves of the conquerors, and such of the men as were
needed to fill servile positions. The conquest of a Christian nation
by a pagan one must have resulting justification of the highest
order, if it is not to be stamped as one of the greatest calamities
of history, and such justification is amply afforded by the splendid
history of the English people. In the light of the achievements for
humanity that are presented by the record of the Anglo-Saxon peoples,
we need not take up the lament of a Gildas over the woes of the
Britons.

The impact of the virile peoples of northern Europe against the
serried ranks of soldiery that circled the lines of the great world
empire was the irresistible impulse of civilization to preserve and to
further the march of the race toward the goal that mankind in all its
wholesome periods has felt to be its unalterable destiny. The conquest
of Britain was a part of this great world movement. Its striking
difference as compared with the method and the results of the
barbarian conquests on the continent lay in the fact that the new
nationalities that there arose in the path of the invaders were Latin,
while the England of Anglo-Saxon creation was essentially Teutonic.
Hardly a vestige of the Roman occupancy of the country remains in
language, in literature, in law, in custom, or in race.

The independence of the English people of Roman influence, and British
as well, leads us to connect the customs, habits, and, in a word, the
status and the civilization of their women, not with the antecedent
line of British life, but with the tribes of the German forests.
Some influence was exerted by the British women upon the life of
the Anglo-Saxons, but it was not sufficient to become an influential
factor in the crystallization of the new nation. Some of the surviving
customs, manners, and superstitions of the English women are of
undoubte