Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/20

 something more suitable to the social wants of man, than the laws and institutions formed under the Roman power. What traces have we in Britain of the Romans? A few military roads, and doubtful sites of camps, posts, and towns,—a few traces of public works, and all indicating a despotic military occupation of the country, and none a civilised condition of the mass of the inhabitants,—alone remain in England to tell the world that here the Roman power flourished during four hundred years.

In every province of the ancient Roman empire, even in Italy itself, the remains of Roman power are of the same character—whether those remains be of material objects, as edifices, public works, roads, temples, statues—or of moral objects, as law, government, religion, and social arrangement; and that character is of a hard iron despotism, in which all human rights, all individual existence in wellbeing, all the objects for which man enters into social union with his fellowman, are disregarded in favour of ruling classes or establishments in the social body, noble, military, or clerical. The Saxon occupation of England lasted for a similar period to the Roman, for about four hundred years. This first wave of the flood of northern populations has left among us traces of laws and institutions, and of a social character and spirit, in which many outlines of freedom and of just principles of social union are distinguishable; and left the influences on the social body of ideas, manners, language, which still exist. But these traces were nearly obliterated, and it is not to be denied that their influence on society was effete, — that in Anglo-Saxon England, as in the rest of Europe, all social arrangement, character, and spirit were assuming one shape and hue under the pressure of superstition, and of the Roman power, institutions, and ascendency, revived through the influence of the church of Rome which had been in full operation for