Their religion, after 150 years, was exchanged for Christianity. Time softened their manners and habits, and mingled new elements with their speech. But the Anglo-Saxon _nature_ has defied the centuries and change. _A strong sense of justice_, and a _resolute resistance to encroachments upon personal liberty_, are the warp and woof of Anglo-Saxon character yesterday, to-day and forever. The steady insistence of these traits has been making English History for precisely 1,400 years, (from 495 to 1895,) and the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America for 200 years as well. Our ancestors brought with them from their native land a simple, just, Teutonic structure of society and government, the base of which was the _individual free-man_. The family was considered the social unit. Several families near together made a township, the affairs of the township being settled by the male freeholders, who met together to determine by conference what should be done. This was the germ of the "town-meeting" and of popular government. In the "witan," or "wise men," who were chosen as advisers and adjusters of difficult questions, exist the future legislature and judiciary, while in the king, or "alder-mann" ("Ealdorman") we see not an oppressor, but one who by superior age and experience is fitted to lead. Cerdic, first Saxon king, was simply Cerdic the "Ealdorman" or "Alder-mann." They were a free people from the beginning. They had never bowed the neck to yoke, their heads had never bent to tyranny. Better far was it that Roman civilization, built upon Keltic-Briton foundation, should have been effaced utterly, and that this strong untamed humanity, even cruel and terrible as it was, should replace it. Roman laws, language, literature, faith, manners, were all swept away. A few mosaics, coins, and ruined fragments of walls and roads are all the record that remains of 300 years of occupation.