With regard to the former, so many years of Roman dominion in the island could hardly fail to have produced, in some respects, a deep and lasting effect upon the native population; but it did not leave, as might have been expected from the existence of the Roman province for so long a period, a provincial people speaking the Roman language, and preserving their laws and customs. The tendency of the Britons was to throw off the stamp of Roman provincialism with the civil government against which they had rebelled, and to relapse into their primitive Celtic habits and modes of thought. This arose partly from the character of the Roman civil rule, partly from the different effect produced by it in different parts of the country. The distance of Britain from the seat of government, its fertility, and the uncertainty of the Roman tenure of the island, caused it to be regarded less as a valuable portion of the Empire than as a distant mine from which every temporary advantage ought to be drawn at whatever cost to the natives. The Roman civil rule was harsh and oppressive; the British provinces a field for exaction, from which everything it could be made to yield was extracted and carried off without remorse. The effects, too, of the Roman rule were various. On the provincials of the fertile, accessible, and completely subjugated districts, they were more deep and lasting. To a great extent they lost their nationality and became Roman citizens. With it went also their natural courage, and either the desire or the spirit to resume an independent position, and they became enervated or effeminate. On the inhabitants of the northern and western portions of the province the effect must have been lighter and more ephemeral in its character. They were more in the position of native tribes under a foreign rule than of the civilised inhabitants of a province. They were exposed to the continual incursions of the barbaric tribes beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire; and as they had in a greater degree preserved their peculiar habits and national characteristics, the withdrawal of the Roman army and civil government was more the removal of a restraint which left them at liberty to resort to their old habits and resume their independent existence as best they might. Even upon the barbarian tribes who had remained in hostility to the Roman rule it exercised an indirect influence. It created union among them—the gradual combination of small communities into larger associations under a general name, and the moulding of a warlike barbarian people into a social organisation in advance of what they had been.