That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations. B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.