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 seas, for there can be no doubt that these wild adventurers, barbarous as they undoubtedly were, became, in the hands of Providence, useful instruments for saving from extinction a large portion of the human race, who, under the Roman rule in the later days of its folly, had become unable to maintain their position either as independent nations, or as provinces of the imperial city. Surely it was good for mankind that the Goths and Vandals became masters of Rome, when Rome in her last decay could no longer govern herself.

Nor was the change of people to the disadvantage of Britain. Though not to the same extent, the Romanized Britons had imbibed the vices of their rulers, and were too effeminate to defend the lands the Romans had, in their extremity, abandoned. The coming of a new race, the Saxons and Angles of Schleswig, was needed to revive the energies of a population who had not been able to drive back the far more barbarous Picts, though, for a long time, under the Anglo-Saxon rule, also, commercial enterprise in Britain remained at a low ebb. For a while, indeed, even the faint light of learning, which remained when the Romans left, appears to have been almost extinguished by the long-continued and bloody wars which, during this gloomy period, depopulated the country and desolated the cities of Britain.

Almost everything that is known of the state of Britain, and of its commerce and manufactures, from the time of its evacuation by Rome till the commencement of the eighth century, is derived from the ancient biographies of the Saints, then the chief, if