Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by Sir Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon French institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up in the school of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the ideal of a political organisation, threw all their weight upon the side of the monarchy, and in favour of centralised administration. More, perhaps, is due to this influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle and Boutmy; but no one of these alleged causes, nor all of them combined, can be accepted as adequate to explain the origin of the difference of national characters. These authors fail also to make clear how the political institutions can have modified character. Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which, as I have said, is, in the present state of science, an unwarrantable assumption. That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate racial qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period, is proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes operating during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar qualities are described by the earliest historians as characterising the ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples, when they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that other branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities, more especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they have long formed part of the French State in the political sense, and have suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of the spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence in the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be still distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every reason to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been equally fixed and enduring.