fore the rise of Japan, the only island power, and to her
consequent isolation may be traced many important differences between
her development and that of the continental powers. Prominent among
these was an early consciousness of national existence, which gave some
purpose to three centuries of otherwise meaningless bloodshed.

As the insulation of England was the most striking among the favorable
circumstances, so love of independence became the distinguishing feature
of the English character, belonging alike to the Saxon of the time of
Tacitus and the Englishman of to-day. The effect of this instinct has
been to invigorate all of the members of the society; and to it is due
the succession of glorious victories won by the English yeomanry over
the French army at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt; the ranks of the
English army being so far superior, individually, to the ranks of the
French, that superiority in the numbers of the French was unavailing.

But, on the other hand, it was the same spirit which caused the Saxon
freeman to stay away from the tribal assembly for several days, in order
to show that he acknowledged no duty to obey: and this spirit, again
which spent the English by more than three hundred years of domestic
wars and left them helpless before sixty thousand Norman and French
invaders.

The very different period of peace and prosperity, which followed upon
Norman tyranny, taught the English to distinguish between a just and an
exaggerated sense of the freedom to which each individual was entitled,
and in Burke's attitude towards the French revolution, we have the
residuum of the struggle between Saxon independence and Norman discipline.

The church of England also expresses the English spirit of liberty. It
stands not for dissent, but for national self-control; it is an
independent, not a protestant church. To realize this, we must remember,
that the desire for separation from the church of Rome showed itself in
the eleventh century; and from then on continuously, until Henry VIII
slit the thin thread which bound England to Rome, the cause of
ecclesiastical and of civil liberty advanced side by side.

It is a noteworthy characteristic of the Saxon, as described by
implication in the Germania of Tacitus, that, while he barely tolerated
a king, he cheerfully obeyed a captain, or war leader. When, therefore,
Angles and Saxons entered upon a period of conquest in England, which
lasted a hundred and fift