tion of cultured English-speaking women are largely due to their constant use of those terse, simple, monosyllabic or dissyllabic words of the ancient speech, with which they deal in swift, sure utterance, ever bringing the most recondite matters into touch with the fireside and the home and the whole range of common human life. On the sea, in the camp, on the battle-field, in the forest or the mountains, in all adventure, stress and strain, in all sudden downright decision, and in times of deepest and most tender emotion, these simple, old-time words are the ones that spring unbidden to the lips of English-speaking men.

Anglo-Saxon is the bed-rock of the English language. In the present structure, tower, battlement and turret have been fashioned according to the architecture of many lands, but all rest secure on that original and imperishable foundation. In the fabric of English as it exists to-day, borrowed portions may be likened to embroidery, often very beautiful, and wrought into elegant patterns, while the substantial original canvas that gives body to the whole and holds it in unity is the Anglo-Saxon.

Reviewing their history from their early invasion as the Roman Empire fell to the time when they themselves were subdued in the Norman Conquest, many are ready to ask, What had the Anglo-Saxons done in six hundred years? They had no architecture, no art worthy of especial mention, and but a limited literature, which the world now cares for

only as it harks back from later glories to those far originals. The English still remained a rude agricultural and sea-faring people. By all their fierce and resolute conquest of England, what, it may be asked, had they accomplished after all?

For one thing, they had lived. They had held the island, once conquered, in firm possession. What the Britons had not been able to do against them, they had done against all comers. They had asked no pirate hordes to defend them against Picts and Scots; but when new hosts of North-Sea pirates had descended upon England, those Anglo-Saxon Englishmen had worn out, by their enduring valor on land and sea, the persistent ferocity of Danes and Northmen, till, at length, they had shut them in, subdued them on the very soil they had conquered, and finally absorbed them into the mass of the English people, making the valor and hardihood of the barbarian hosts elements of the strength of that wonderful fusion of races whose power and name and speech have become proudly known around the world.

They had evolved a new people, so distinctive in character as to be called the "English race." Through the darkest periods of their early history shone out the qualities that have everywhere marked their existence and their advance-steady, resolute, enduring, often stubborn; practical, often unduly devoted to the concrete and the commonplace; tenacious of old, established facts, opinions, cus

toms, and associations, building any new advance only upon advances already made; home-loving, with a deep tenderness under a rugged exterior; with emotion that does not effervesce, but burns with a white heat under a cold demeanor, expressing itself not in words but in deeds; capable of standing calmly on the sinking deck, passing the word, "Women and children first," till all the weak and helpless have been saved; following the call of faith, loyalty, and duty, not merely into the face but into the very fact of death; ready to die for kindred or country with a still devotion that scarcely knows how to speak of love or patriotism, for which it is giving its all; able to blunder and fail, to be defeated, conquered, killed-but never dismayed, to be stubbornly resolute in retreating and never so dangerous as after a defeat. The maxim of their far-off sires ever pervaded their resolute ranks:

"The mind must be the firmer, the heart must be the keener, The mood must be the bolder, as our might lesseneth."

They had developed the wonderful resiliency that has ever since marked their race, that, after whatever repulse or defeat, when opportunity called anew, in what might seem the most unpropitious hour, it would find them ready-the only promise or omen needed being that they themselves were there. From their centuries of battle, they could not help being a martial people, avoiding when possible, as practical men, the waste and destruction of

war, yet always ready when necessary to respond to its call. Full of contrasts, but always sturdy, vigorous and mighty, the English race had come into being.

That race has the inexplicable quality, so highly prized in certain animal stocks, of "breeding true to type." The qualities of that type have come down unchanged through the centuries and have gone with the race around the world. The descendants of the English in Canada and the United States, in New Zealand and in Australia, are typical still. The Saxon king, Alfred the Great, was typically English, and to Americans he seems typically American, too. Tremendous in battle, when that was necessary, wise and shrewd in strategy, broad and statesmanlike in plans, seeing the need, when he had stopped the advance of the Danes already in England, to meet the new swarms of pirates on the ocean without waiting for them to set foot on the land, building around the "silvercoasted isle" the floating ramparts that guard her still; then, in the moment of victory, gladly laying aside the sword to rebuild the civilization that war had trampled down and, amid the cares of state, giving his nights, marked off by measured candles, to translating from the Latin such works as might best serve the clergy and people of his day,—we feel at home with him at once. He is a man who might live to-day on English ground. In his retirement among the marshes of Athelney, he reminds

Americans of our own Washington in the grim winter at Valley Forge, that way-station on the road to victory at Yorktown.

Later we see the same type in many a hero of the American Civil War, doing in battle all that man might do, then laying off the warrior with the uniform, returning with delight to the well-loved home and the quiet pursuits of peace, becoming a leader in business, a statesman or a scholar, happy to do some greater thing than to "see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war."

To found the English race was by itself a mighty achievement. Call it good or evil, judge it as friend or foe, we must pronounce the English civilization evolved from the Anglo-Saxon conquest one of the mightiest facts of history. That civilization has stretched across oceans, continents and islands, and starred the world with its outposts; and the speech of those rude conquerors has become the substratum of the language now spoken by more than two hundred millions of men.

Those early Englishmen had conquered not only human foes but hostile nature. They had mastered and developed the land. Of course, such a work is progressive, and what was then considered a highly improved condition would be deemed very rude to-day. We can only estimate what they had done by comparing the land as they had made it with the land as they had found it.