pt the Teutonic
Knights, who killed off the Borussi or Old-Prussian savages, about
seven hundred years ago, and then settled the empty land with their
soldiers of fortune, camp-followers, hirelings, and serfs. These gangs
had been brought together, by force or the hope of booty, from anywhere
at all. The new Prussians were thus a pretty badly mixed lot; so the
Teutonic Knights hammered them into shape as the newer Prussians whom
Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century and Bismarck in the
nineteenth turned into a conquering horde. The Kaiser's newest
Prussians need no description here. We all know him and them; and what
became of both; and how it served them right.

The first of the hardy Norsemen to arrive in England with a regular
fleet and army were the two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, whom the Celts
employed to defend them against the wild Picts that were swarming down
from the north. The Picts once beaten, the Celts soon got into the
same troubles that beset every people who will not or can not fight for
themselves. More and more Norsemen kept coming to the Isle of Thanet,
the easternmost point of Kent, and disputes kept on growing between
them and the Celts over pay and food as well as over the division of
the spoils. The Norsemen claimed most of the spoil, because their
sword had won it. The Celts thought this unfair, because the country
was their own. It certainly was theirs at that time. But they had
driven out the people who had been there before them; so when they were
themselves driven out they suffered no more than what they once had
made these others suffer.

Presently the Norsemen turned their swords on the Celts and began a
conquest that went on from father to son till there were hardly any
Celts left in the British Isles outside of Wales, the Highlands of
Scotland, and the greater part of Ireland. Every place easily reached
from the sea fell into the hands of the Norsemen whenever they chose to
take it; for the Celts never even tried to have a navy. This, of
course, was the chief reason why they lost the war on land; because the
Norsemen, though fewer by far at first, could move men, arms, and
supplies ten times better than the Celts whenever the battlefields were
anywhere near the sea.

Islands, harbours, and navigable rivers were often held by the
Norsemen, even when the near-by country was filled with Celts. The
extreme north of Scotland, like the whole of the south, became Norse