breaking of stormy waves upon the rocks, leaving the shore-line of racial and national integrity unchanged. Cnut was able to govern England only because he dismissed his Danish troops, gave up his barbaric ferocity, accepted the English civilization, religion, and law, and made himself, to all intents and purposes, an English king. Through all, England held its own. England was England still, and, after twenty-five years of Danish rule, the line of Alfred returned and was welcomed to the throne in 1041, under a weak but lineal descendant, whom his people remembered chiefly for his piety, by the name of "Edward the Confessor." He became king, not of Wessex or Northumberland, not of Kent or Mercia, but of England. As such he reigned for twenty-five years, until his death in the very year of the Norman Conquest. Through such a history as this was evolved that Anglo-Saxon language which has become the basis of English speech. II ANGLO-SAXON ACHIEVEMENT THE clearest and most vigorous English speech of the twentieth century has its source in the language of the peoples who crossed the North Sea from the continent of Europe, conquered Britain and made it England fifteen hundred years ago. Through all wars and changes the language of those ancient conquerors-which has received the bookname of Anglo-Saxon-has stubbornly held its own, so that at present the proportion of Anglo-Saxon in modern English, exclusive of scientific and technical terms, is about five-eighths; in the vocabulary of conversation, four-fifths. Modern English has borrowed freely from Latin, French, German, and every other tongue known among men, but the children of the English-speaking races all start in life with the Anglo-Saxon. The children of the scholar, the author, the statesman, all bring into his home and to his table that simple, ancient speech; they regard our abstract terms and elegant synonyms from many lands as "grown-up language," which they can not be expected to speak and will not if they can help it, and which they do not even understand until they have translated it into the familiar homespun of the primeval English. The charm and vividness that mark the conversa |