the artistic instinct that devised so happy a symbolism, and the rare good-fortune of our Teutonic ancestors in securing a territorial position so readily defensible against the assaults of despotic powers. But it was not merely in the simple facility of warding off external attack that the insular position of England was so serviceable. This ease in warding off external attack had its most marked effect upon the internal polity of the nation. It never became necessary for the English government to keep up a great standing army. For purposes of external defence a navy was all-sufficient; and there is this practical difference between a permanent army and a permanent navy. Both are originally designed for purposes of external defence; but the one can readily be used for purposes of internal oppression, and the other cannot. Nobody ever heard of a navy putting up an empire at auction and knocking down the throne of the world to a Didius Julianus. When, therefore, a country is effectually screened by water from external attack, it is screened in a way that permits its normal political development to go on internally without those manifold military hinderances that have ordinarily been so obstructive in the history of civilization. Hence we not only see why, after the Norman Conquest had operated to increase its unity and its strength, England enjoyed a far greater amount of security and was far more peaceful than any other country in Europe; but we also see why society never assumed the military type in England which it assumed upon the continent; we see how it was that the bonds of feudalism were far looser here than elsewhere, and therefore how it happened that nowhere else was the condition of the common people so good politically. We now begin to see, moreover, how thoroughly Professor Stubbs and Mr. Freeman are justified in insisting upon the fact that the political institutions of the Germans of Tacitus have had a more normal and uninterrupted development in England than anywhere else. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history of the human race, can we point to such a well-rounded and unbroken continuity of political life as we find in the thousand years of English history that have elapsed since the victory of William the Norman at Senlac. In England the free government of the primitive Aryans has been to this day uninterruptedly maintained, though everywhere lost or seriously impaired on the continent of Europe, except in remote Scandinavia and impregnable Switzerland. But obviously, if in the conflict of ages between civilization and barbarism England had occupied such an inferior strategic position as that occupied by Hungary or Poland or Spain, if her territory had been liable once or twice in a century to be overrun by fanatical Saracens or beastly Mongols, no such remarkable and quite exceptional result could have been achieved. Having duly fathomed the significance of this strategic position of the English race while