"And then the shadow of thy coming fell
On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow."
We have recently celebrated the millennium of this illustrious ruler. It should be made an occasion for the advancement of the purposes I am {74} here opening. These purposes would have been Alfred's.
(b) The Consolidation of the Different Kingdoms of England into One
Although from the time of the landing of the Jutes, Saxons, and Engles (449), their history is jejune and scanty, and the occurrences of four centuries have been condensed by an accomplished historian[4] into a few pages of history, yet sufficient appears to show that the several governments established by them in England were engaged in many bloody and bitter intestine contests, and that the consolidation of the people was first effected by Egbert (about 827). This union lasted only five years, and we are told that it was brought about, "for the moment, by the sword of Egbert." It was a union of sheer force, which broke down at the first blow of the sea robbers—the Northmen—who, about this time, invaded England. But the very chance which destroyed the new England was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life which made its union real. "The peoples who had so long looked on each other as enemies found themselves confronted by a common foe. They were thrown together by a common danger, and the need of a common defence. Their common faith grew into a national bond, as religion struggled, hand in hand, with England itself; against the heathen of the North."[5] They recognised a common king, as a common struggle {75} changed Alfred and his sons from mere leaders of West Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with the stranger, and when the work which Alfred set his house to do was done; when the yoke of the Northmen was lifted from the last of his conquests, Engle, Saxon, Northumbrian, and Mercian, spent with the battle for a common freedom and a common country, knew themselves, in the hour of their deliverance, as an English people.[6]
The work of Alfred was to save the Saxon name and existence—that he accomplished. His conquest, on the other hand, was never complete. His wars ended in compromise, the Danes retaining large settlements in the North and East of England. Subsequently, their invasions were renewed. In Canute's reign, they were the prevailing people. In all these life-and-death struggles, there is nothing that detracts. The Danes should be considered as a cognate people, alternating with the Saxons, and finally blending with them; quite as often defenders of the soil as invaders, and contributing largely to the formation of the national character. In the struggle against the Norman king, they were the last to succumb.
The union which each several tribe within the nation had in turn failed to bring about was realised from the pressure of the Northmen. It seems that at the close of the eighth century, the drift of the English people towards national unity was utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria had {76} been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia had broken down before the resistance of Wessex; and a threefold division had stamped itself upon the land. So completely was the balance of power between the three realms which parted it, that no subjection of one to the other seemed likely to fuse the English tribes into an English people; yet the consolidation of the several kingdoms of England into one was eventually reached.[7]
It was the second step in its national progress.
What brought it about? Mark this well. The instinct of self-preservation, of which the ambition, more or less enlightened, of the several petty kings, was the instrument; the external force in the ravages of the Northmen; the marriages and alliances between the tribes; in fine, all of the same causes which to-day are operating with greater force towards the unification of the English-speaking peoples.
Compare England in this connection with the Grecian cities. The unhappy destiny of the latter was complete before they realised the benefit of consolidation, and when it was at last advocated, and in some small degree adopted, it was too late. We read of the Ætolian League and the Achaian League, but only as studies to the political thinker of an idea to which there was always wanting the power of fulfilment. Where lies the difference? Not in intellect, surely, for no race has ever surpassed the Greek in intellect. In what then? Simply, as I understand, in character—in that especial endowment by which the Anglo-Saxon {77} race so moulds itself, in its civic and social relations, as to attain the highest purposes of political wisdom, moderation, the subordination of self, the rejection of false or impossible ideals, together with a kind of innate perception of the value of time and occasion, in combination with persistency, stability, and courage—these are the qualities which have made its institutions at once models for the rest of the world, and the subjects of its envy. The fatal disease of small political entities ran through all the Grecian states, and they were doomed. Consolidation, with the Greeks, was never more than a faintly formed idea; with the English, like all other political conceptions, it soon became a fact.
(c) The Influence of the Roman Law upon England's Progress