st dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first
_conquistadores_ in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out,
rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their
names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the
peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and
the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more as
centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races--master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed
in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
conquest.

The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been
always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists to change their
occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into the
ranks above them; as they could sink, if they were unable men, into the
ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English
surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a
single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he
will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward or
Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister--now
names of farmers in my own parish--or other Norman-French names which may
be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll--and side by side the
almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or
Norwegian house-carle, proud of his name Biorn the Bear, and the
ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he be
now peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own
forge. This holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search
through (as I delight to do) your N