habits which, by the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Eolians had exchanged for the more polished manners acquired during their progress in civilisation. These two kindred tribes, when they came into collision, regarded each other as foreigners; though once the ancestors of Ionians, Dorians, Achaians, Æolians, and Boeotians had lived as the same people and spoken the common Hellenic tongue. So Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Normans all belonged to the Teutonic stock, of which they spoke each a different dialect. When the Normans invaded England, the Danish inhabitants looked upon them as of a foreign race (Romani seu Francigeni), and sent to Denmark for assistance, and some Danes came over from Denmark for the purpose of avenging the slaughter of their kinsman Harold and his followers slain in battle by the Franks.* After the amalgamation between Normans and Saxons had commenced, the Scandinavians abandoned all connection with England. This dates from about 1086; after that the English are always spoken of in the Danish laws as a people wholly foreign, owing mainly to the difference in the language caused by the adoption of some of the French words.+

These outbranching kinsmen when, after many wanderings, they met as strangers on common ground, no longer equals, but in the various degrees of authority or subbordination, the result of the several conquests in which they had won or lost, have at last formed by their fusion the English nation, as from the fusion of their dialects has arisen the English language.

Language, indeed, the most enduring monument of social changes, carries down into the late ages, when the elements of society have coalesced and forgotten their

*"Ad ulciscendam consanguinei necem, Haroldi scilicet a Francigenis interempti, et Angliam pristinæ libertati restituendam."-Script. Rer. Danic. iii. 254.

See quotations from the Sagan af Gunnlaugi in Thierry, ii. 284 sq.

ancient differences, the unmistakable traces of the former coexistence in marked distinction of a serf and a dominant population. Seldom has the conquering people succeeded in imposing its language on the serf masses; but it has often been the cause of introducing into the language, which is the result of the commixture of the two dialects, a double set of words or phrases for the same idea. So that in the use of his native tongue, the Italian frequently has the choice of expressing himself after the manner of the Lombards or of the Romans, the old Romans themselves had in many cases synonyms from two stocks-the Eolic and the Sabine, and we select our words unconsciously from the vernacular of the Anglo-Saxon churl, or the courtly language of the Norman baron. In the end the dialect of the subject nation generally vindicates itself against the conquerors. The Normans and the Sabines, few in number in comparison with the Saxons and the Latins, eventually came to speak, but with slight admixture from their own store, the language of their serfs. It is curious, however, to observe that the words adopted from the conquerors are chiefly political and military. It is an observation of Niebuhr (the correctness of which has, without substantial reason, been controverted), that all words relating to war and the chase are of Sabine origin, while those which refer to tillage and home life are from the Æolic or old Latin dialect. A recent author of deserved popularity+ has made a similar remark, that the Saxons named the board, the ox, cow, sheep, plough; but the dressed beef, veal, venison, are all Norman, and so are the words denoting all articles employed in the chase or personal ornament.

The tendency of each invasion is to establish the broad division into two classes, the dominant and the serf; but in the case of repeated invasions, the old dominant class, or if there be no previous invasion, the class of native chieftains does not sink entirely to the level of its former

*Hist. of Rome, i. 32.

† Trench, Study of Words, p. 64.

subjects, but receives at the hand of its conquerors a sort of subaltern rank. Thus the Senatus Populusque Romanus was a compromise between the old pioro and the chief men of the Latins. The Sabines formed the senators, the populus were the old Latin leaders; the plebs, the mass of the lower Latins, having at this early stage no political existence. So the minor barons of the Norman constitution included some of the principal men. of the country before William's invasion, and the pixo of the Spartan constitution have been with great reason supposed to be either the conquerors in a prior invasion, or the native chieftains of the Helot populace.

The original relation of the conquerors among themselves is immaterial to their position in their new settlements, however low they may have been in their native country, they are all nobles so far as the subject people are concerned. The Sabine clients became Roman patricians; William's personal attendants found themselves, after crossing the channel, English noblemen.

What is the first step after the conquest is accomplished, and a line, not to be crossed for ages, drawn between aristocrat and serf? For a living example of a previous stage in social progress we pointed to Norway, for an instance of the present we may refer to a constitution of antiquity, celebrated as much for the political sagacity of its founder as for a long duration, the more remarkable from the rapid transitions of the states around it. The constitution of Lycurgus has sometimes been called a democracy, at others an aristocracy, and more often a mixture of the two, with a slight monarchical ingredient. Had politicians but imitated the example of anatomists and studied their subject comparatively, not only would the Spartan system have been freed from the common reputation of being an odd anomaly among governments, but it would have been selected for special study as the most perfect example of a type which has often

recurred. The origin of the Lacedæmonian legislature was the conflict which arose, soon after the settlement of the Dorians in Laconia, between the elective kings and the uncrowned members of the conquering race; and the object of the laws of Lycurgus was to preserve the nation precisely in that state into which it entered at the moment of the Dorian conquest. The dominant race, the apσTo, were the sovereign power of the state; if one desires, therefore, to class this constitution under either of the three ordinary forms, there is no other alternative but to call it, with Plato*, an aristocracy. They had earned their possessions by warlike habits, and it was the object of the legislature to continue this military life, to keep them from amalgamating with the subject populace, to prevent their enervation by luxury, in short to maintain the character they originally possessed, that of an invading army, settled in the lands of an agricultural and less hardy people. We know the character that was formed, cruel to their subjects, noble just and generous among themselves, the Spartans passed their lives in being trained for warriors. Their object was not to invade their neighbours, but to remain the chief of the Grecian races; not blended like the Dorians at Sicyon, Corinth, Argolis, and Messenia, with those whom they had conquered, nor by the soft seductions of the arts of peace preparing themselves to be the prey of a future invasion. The conquered race were wholly employed in agriculture, which the Spartans disdained. They were divided into 1, Perioici; a class probably composed of the chief persons among the Achæan, who were allowed to live in peace upon their estates, but wholly excluded from political power; and 2, the Helots, who were reduced to complete serfdom. Like the villains of the middle ages, they belonged to the soil (ascripti gleba), and were not allowed to enrich them

*Leg. iv. p. 712.

selves by handicrafts, or indulged with any means of alleviating their degraded condition.

In the prehistoric regime, already illustrated by reference to the Homeric poems, it has been observed that the nation in fact consists of an aggregate of tribes or clans, each totally independent of the other, till their chieftains in council agree to elect one head of the whole nation. Now a similar adjustment is made afterwards by the invading race, but with this important difference, that whereas before the introduction of a feudal dominion the broad line of distinction is not so much between the chiefs on the one hand and their clansfolk on the other, as between the several clans, counting the chiefs as merely the headmen of their tribes. On the contrary, after the invasion and the establishment of a feudal relation, such as that effected by the Dorians in the Peloponnese, the northern tribes in modern Europe, and the Mahrattas in India, the aristocrats are all of one race, and banded together among themselves by that inseparable tie. They take to themselves large tracts of lands, and as incident thereto the serfs, "ascripti gleba," who acknowledge them severally for their lords. The line is thus drawn between aristocrats and serfs. The whole sovereignty resides in the former. Each baron is perfectly independent of his fellows, but the necessity of combination among themselves to keep down the subject people is an additional stimulus to the desire for unity and centralisation, even national existence, which had urged the independent small kings of the previous regime to erect a common head. The monarch, for example the Roman, the Etruscan*, is at first elected by the barons assembled, and this election would be some ground for the supporting of the "Original Contract," if it were not that the parties to the election are the king and the barons

* Niebuhr, H. R. i. 123.