esumption of progressive
thought and scientific knowledge, at the point where it had been
interrupted by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century. The unjaded
vigour of the German races, indeed, counted for much; and Europe took up
the lost thread of the dying empire with a youthful freshness very
different from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean culture in
its last stage. Yet it is none the less true that our whole civilisation
is even now the carrying out and completion of the Greek and Roman
culture in new fields and with fresh intellects. We owe little here to
the Anglo-Saxon; we owe everything to the great stream of western
culture, which began in Egypt and Assyria, permeated Greece and the
Archipelago, spread to Italy and the Roman empire, and, finally, now
embraces the whole European and American world. The Teutonic intellect
and the Teutonic character have largely modified the spirit of the
Mediterranean civilisation; but the tools, the instruments, the
processes themselves, are all legacies from a different race. Englishmen
did not invent letters, money, metallurgy, glass, architecture, and
science; they received them all ready-made, from Italy and the AEgean, or
more remotely still from the Euphrates and the Nile. Nor is it necessary
to add that in religion we have no debt to the Anglo-Saxon, our existing
creed being entirely derived through Rome from the Semitic race.

In _institutions_, once more, the Anglo-Saxon has contributed almost
everything. Our political government, our limited monarchy, our
parliament, our shires, our hundreds, our townships, are considered by
the dominant school of historians to be all Anglo-Saxon in origin. Our
jury is derived from an Anglo-Saxon custom; our nobility and officials
are representatives of Anglo-Saxon earls and reeves. The Teuton, when he
settled in Britain, brought with him the Teutonic organisation in its
entirety. He established it throughout the whole territory which he
occupied or conquered. As the West Saxon over-lordship grew to be the
English kingdom, and as the English kingdom gradually annexed or
coalesced with the Welsh and Cornish principalities, the Scotch and
Irish kingdoms,--the Teutonic system spread over the whole of Britain.
It underwent some little modification at the hands of the Normans, and
more still at those of the Angevins; but, on the whole, it is still a
wide yet natural development of the old Germanic constitution.

Thus, to sum