China, and other states in which labor and vigilance have been necessary to cope with certain difficulties of the soil or situation, are further proofs of this influence of climate on national character. If we look to England—we think it could be shown that all she is—all that contrasts in her so strongly with the condition of other European nations, has been owing to her place on the map. Beneath a variable sky, the soil, which would yield little spontaneously, was still rich enough to reward cultivation; and so the Anglo-Saxons—not to go further back—became agricultural and accustomed to toil. Their tribes, occupying a series of independent localities, after a primitive fashion, were necessarily accustomed to look to their own plow-lands, hundreds, parishes and counties, and regulate them independently. The space of the island was too small to permit any nomade movements; and when it was brought to acknowledge a common ruler, the parish and county regulations were in customary force. The agricultural and household fixity of the people allowed them to form regular habits and ideas of policy. The circumstances of the island did not encourage any central despotism to grow up in it like that of Charlemagne over France and Europe. Girt by the waters of the four seas, the Saxon polity had time to grow hardened on the soil, so that the invasions of the Danes and the Normans had no power to do away with it. The Norman government, imposed for centuries on the island, grew-weak in time before the well-rooted Anglo-Saxonism of the land; the early county representatives flowered at last into the Parliament, and the _folkmotes_ of Egbert and the Confessor are, at this day, flourishing bravely and remarkably on wide-severed hemispheres of the globe. The isolation of England preserved her from the despotic influences of the continent. But for her separating sea, she would have been many times overrun by her neighbors. If she had touched the bounds of France or the Low Countries, she might have passed under the French crown in the reign of King John, or she would have been overrun by the terrible Spanish infantry—a _land_ armada—in the days of Philip; or would have had Napoleon, in 1804, dating his European decrees from the brick-built palace of St. James’. The ocean gods that have been the friends of Great Britain, have vindicated the truth of Dr. Arnold’s assertion—in fostering a maritime wealth and empire, of which no former example has at any time existed in the world, and which will only be exceeded when the Anglo-Saxonism which is the moral back-bone of this continent—obeying the unexpired old insular impulse of the slow gathering years long before the Mayflower floated—shall spread out a broader breadth of canvas to all the winds of Heaven—a more Briarean strength of arm over the seas and shores of the world.