Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/23

 that the people had neither energy to fight, nor property, laws, or institutions to defend, and were merely serfs on the land of nobles, or of the church, who had nothing to lose by a change of masters. It is to the renewal of the original institutions, social condition, and spirit of Anglo-Saxon society, by the fresh infusion of these Danish conquerors into a very large proportion of the whole population in the 11th century—and not to the social state of the forest Germans in the 1st century—that we must look for the actual origin of our national institutions, character, and principles of society, and for that check of the popular opinion and will upon arbitrary rule which grew up by degrees, showing itself even in the first generation after William the Conqueror, and which slowly but necessarily produced the English constitution, laws, institutions, and character. The same seed was no doubt sown by the old Anglo-Saxons, and by the Northmen—for they were originally the same people; but the seed of the former had perished under Romish superstition and church influence, during five centuries in which the mind and property in every country were subjugated to the priesthood whose home was at Rome; and the seed of the latter flourished, because it was fresh from a land in which all were proprietors with interests at stake, and accustomed, although in a very rude and violent way, to take a part, by Things, or assemblies of the people, in all the acts of their government.

Some German, Anglo-American, and English writers, with a silly vanity, and a kind of party feeling, claim a pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race among the European people of our times, in the social, moral, political, and religious elements of society, and even in physical powers—in intellect and in arms. This is the echo of a bray first heard in the forgotten controversy about the authenticity of Ossian's Poems.