Page:Landholding in England.djvu/12

 those virtues known as progressive. The more conservative a man is, the more ought he to desire for his country a numerous peasantry, who are not petty tenants-at-will, subject to eviction, but little freeholders, secure in their tenure.

The Saxons were of the great Gothic stock—the second of the three great migrations from East to West, from Asia to Europe. At first they were called Scythians; but even by Pliny's time, one tribe of them had become so predominant that the Persians called all Scythians "Sacae," from their ancient name of "Saksun." The Saxons were of the same blood as the Teutons, but they had spread farther west, and Tacitus does not mention them among the great Germanic tribes. At first the Saxons settled on the north side of the Elbe, on the neck of the Cimbric Chersonesus—the old name of the Danish provinces—and in the three isles, Nordstrand, Busen and Heligoland. Soon they spread over the whole region between the Elbe and the Eyder—over Jutland, Friesland, Schleswich and Holstein. They became a Confederacy of Tribes, of which the Angles of Holstein were the chief; and so the whole Confederacy came to be called "Anglo-Saxons."

From their earliest appearance on the stage of history, the Saxons were sea-rovers—to put it plainly, pirates—and Heligoland was their chief nest. Long before the Romans left Britain, the Saxons had become so terrible that the officer appointed to protect our southern coast was called "the Count of the Saxon Shore."

But though the Saxons were pirates, and though their conquest of Britain was one of the most ruthless known to history; though till they became Christian they created nothing, destroyed all the Romans had created, and were solely engaged in cutting one another's throats, in what Milton calls their "wars of kites and crows"; yet they brought with them a precious inheritance, destined to shape the political history of all their after-time. This was the idea of an Assembly of the People; it was called the Witenage-