d in taking care of their
own. Every record and every indication shows them to us as fiercer
heathen prototypes of the Scotch clans in the most lawless days of the
Highlands. Incapable of union for any peaceful purpose at home, they
learned their earliest lesson of subordination in their piratical
attacks upon the civilised Christian community of Roman Britain. We
first meet with them in history in the character of destroyers and
sea-robbers. Yet they possessed already in their wild marshy home the
germs of those free institutions which have made the history of England
unique amongst the nations of Europe.

CHAPTER III.

THE ENGLISH SETTLE IN BRITAIN.

Proximity to the sea turns robbers into corsairs. When predatory tribes
reach the seaboard they always take to piracy, provided they have
attained the shipbuilding level of culture. In the ancient AEgean, in the
Malay Archipelago, in the China seas, we see the same process always
taking place. Probably from the first period of their severance from the
main Aryan stock in Central Asia, the Low German race and their
ancestors had been a predatory and conquering people, for ever engaged
in raids and smouldering warfare with their neighbours. When they
reached the Baltic and the islands of the Frisian coast, they grew
naturally into a nation of pirates. Even during the bronze age, we find
sculptured stones with representations of long row-boats, manned by
several oarsmen, and in one or two cases actually bearing a rude sail.
Their prows and sterns stand high out of the water, and are adorned with
intricate carvings. They seem like the predecessors of the long
ships--snakes and sea-dragons--which afterwards bore the northern
corsairs into every river of Europe. Such boats, adapted for long
sea-voyages, show a considerable intercourse, piratical or commercial,
between the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian North and other distant
countries. Certainly, from the earliest days of Roman rule on the German
Ocean to the thirteenth century, the Low Dutch and Scandinavian tribes
carried on an almost unbroken course of expeditions by sea, beginning in
every case with mere descents upon the coast for the purposes of
plunder, but ending, as a rule, with regular colonisation or political
supremacy. In this manner the people of the Baltic and the North Sea
ravaged or settled in every country on the sea-shore, from Orkney,
Shetland, and the Faroes, to Normandy, Apulia, and Greece; from B