Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/120

 in the counties of recent Danish descent, not in those peopled by the old Anglo-Saxon race. The spirit and character of men having rights in society were undoubtedly renewed, and kept alive in England, by this great infusion into the population of people who had these rights, and the spirit and character produced by them, in their native land. A new and more vigorous branch was planted in the country than the old Anglo-Saxon. In historical research it is surely more reasonable to go to the nearest source of the institutions, laws, and spirit of a people—to the recent and great infusion into England from the north, during the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, of men bred up in a rude but vigorous exercise of their rights in legislation, and in all the acts of their government—than to the most remote, and to trace in the obscure hints of Tacitus of popular and free institutions existing a thousand years before in the forests of Germany, the origin of our parliaments, constitution, and national character. The German people, the true unmixed descendants of the old Saxon race whom Tacitus describes, never, from the earliest date in modern history to the present day, had a single hour of religious, civil, and political liberty, as nations, or as individuals,—never enjoyed the rights which the American citizen or the British subject, however imperfectly, enjoy in the freedom of person, property, and mind, at the present day, in their social condition. If the great stock itself of the Anglo-Saxon race has not transmitted to its immediate posterity in its own land the institutions of a free people, nor the spirit, character, independence of mind, on which alone they can be founded with stability, it appears absurd to trace to that stock our free institutions, and the principles in our character and spirit by which they are maintained, when we find a source so much nearer from which they would naturally flow. Our civil, religious, and political rights,—the principles,