from abroad, he determined at all costs to protect the Island; and he was the earliest of his line to realize that his country's first defense was the sea that washed its shores. Already, in 875, he had been the victor in Swanage Bay over a small but strong fleet of pirates; and, after the peace of Wedmore, he set himself to the serious construction and effective distribution of a fleet of war. With no lack of raw material, with good craftsmen, and with a maritime population needing nothing but initiative, he built a navy that, in respect of personnel no less than in technical equipment, soon outclassed that of the Danes. Distributed round the coast, he had, according to varying accounts, from 120 to 300 warships; and, behind this bulwark, for the next fifteen years, England achieved an almost miraculous degree of progress. In 896, after a considerable struggle, another attempted invasion was crushed, and Alfred's fleet, grown in strength and experience, extinguished the recurrence of piracy that had accompanied it. Merciful in character and tolerant in statesmanship, toward these pirates he showed no clemency, and, when he died in 901, he left a country prosperous and at peace and with its sea-boards inviolate.

To what extent his son and grandson, Edward the Elder and Athelstan, appreciated the full significance of sea-power we do not know; but it is interesting that Athelstan, during whose brilliant reign the Danish portions of England were largely reabsorbed, conferred the dignity of thane-ship upon any merchant who had made three voyages of length in his own trading vessel—thereby fostering, and even perhaps founding, the dynasty of those merchant-adventurers, upon whom in years to come, and on seas then unknown, Britain was to climb to a destiny beyond his imaginings. Nor can the work of Alfred and Athelstan, in these respects, be discounted because of the eclipse that followed in the reign of Ethelred, and that led to the passing of England, predominantly Saxon, under Danish sovereignty for a quarter of a century, and then, after a further period of twenty-four years, under the permanent rule of the Normans.

Tenacious of its rights, impossible to dragoon, there has always been a strain of inertia in the Saxon character—the reflex of that tolerance, perhaps, which has in so many respects been the secret of its influence throughout the world; and it was probably inevitable that there should have been phases in our national growth, and especially in its adolescence, when this should have seemed to be uppermost. To the minority Celt, with his quicker wits, this has often and justly been a subject of annoyance. In it the Normans, conscious in their persons of the latest current of oversea adventure, avid of culture, and contemptuous of ignorance, saw, and at once seized, their opportunity. For men of their enterprise, intellectual subtlety, and disciplined military energy, the prosperous island, with its clannish dissensions and lack of organization, seemed an obvious prey. And if, in the immediate moment, they were largely successful owing to the flank attack upon Harold by his brother Tostig, it was to a lack of vision, curiously Anglo-Saxon, that they were hardly less indebted for their victory.

Gathering for the defense of the realm, both by land and sea, the largest forces that had ever been collected in England, had William and his armies tried to land a month or two earlier they might well have done so in vain. But with August and September came the demands of the harvest, the autumn ploughing, and the neglected farms. As so often before and since in English history, the parochial and individual obscured the national. William had not come. Perhaps he would never come. The discontented soldiery could not be kept together. The ships of the Fleet, or many of them, had to return for re-fitting, and, when on September 28th, William arrived at Pevensey, three days after Harold had defeated his brother at Stamford Bridge, it was to land unopposed both on shore and at sea. Moreover, there was yet another factor, and one also that was to recur again and again in English history—a failure, fresh from military victory, to appreciate the value of sea-power—that contributed not a little to Harold's defeat. By October 14th, the date of the Battle of Hastings, the English Fleet had again been mobilized, and held the Channel. Between their position in Sussex and their base in France, the Normans' connections had been cut; and, just as in later years it was Nelson's "storm-tossed ships upon which the Grand Army never looked" that stood between Napoleon and the dominion of the world, so might Harold's, had he trusted them more fully, have stood between William of Normandy and the conquest of England.

With William's forces dependent for their supplies upon the rapidly dwindling stores of the surrounding country; with that silent pressure behind him of England's naval power—there would have been time and plenty, had Harold been content to wait, for the English armies to have consolidated themselves in overwhelming strength. But it was not to be. Dazzled by his recent success, and thinking in terms of armies rather than navies, he forced the issue and was defeated, and England passed under Norman power; and yet so incompletely that there are few Englishmen of to-day who, on reading the story of the Battle of Hastings, do not instinctively associate themselves with the defeated Harold rather than with the conquering William.

Nor is that as remarkable as it might superficially appear, since, within a very few decades of the Battle of Hastings, the same absorptive process that had been so characteristic a reaction of these islands to their previous conquerors was again in full swing. Even the Romans, although in Gaul and Spain they had succeeded in replacing the original dialects with their own stately language, had never succeeded in Latinizing Britain to any appreciable extent; and, while it is true that many Roman contributions remain as permanent features of our laws and customs, their four hundred years' sojourn left a scarcely perceptible impress upon the tongue of the supposedly defeated. Just as in Roman times, too, there was a considerable and real mingling, both in municipal life and in actual marriage, between the original inhabitants and the Roman colonists, so, in Saxon times, we find a similar process always at work in varying degrees, and indeed officially encouraged by several of the most far-sighted of the Anglo-Saxon kings and administrators. A similar absorptive phenomenon became observable in the later relations of Saxon and Dane; and, with the loss of Normandy, in the reign of King John, and the common cause then made between the French-derived barons and the English hitherto so despised by them, the world was to hear in Magna Charta the first authentic word of the England that we know to-day.

Nor was this process, unique though it was, as far as recorded history can inform us, altogether inexplicable when the position of Great Britain and its succeeding invaders is considered. To each group of these, in the then world, it was an Ultima Thule. Beyond it, as far as they knew, there was no other—it was the verge of all things. To each its occupation had been an adventure, presumably undertaken by the most daring of the represented race. Each was at bay there to those that followed and of a spirit and fibre that could not easily be obliterated; and, in each, despite the ferocity of the times, was the respect of brave men for each other. Centuries later, on the other side of the Atlantic, similar conditions were to come into being; and it may well be that, in the larger island of America, we are witnessing a similar process on an extended scale.

But America was then in