As the Conqueror stood among the sovereigns of that day, so stood the Normans among the contemporary races. They were of peculiar type, these men--both sovereign and subject--and were cast in a like mold. They had body, sap, color, concentrated vigor, and inbred Thracian fire. They had a sort of racial distinction which in its merely personal aspects was never lost. Mingling with all races, they yet stood in a sense separate and apart from all. They were as the _Haut Brion_ among the wines of the Bordelais. But, unlike their native vine, they bore transplantation to any land, and drew perpetual vigor from every soil. Strange as it may seem, there is a confessed incapacity for colonization in the Frenchman of to-day, and stranger still is the remedy for this defect which some of their leading thinkers have proposed, to wit, that the Frenchman should transmogrify himself _into an Anglo-Saxon_. Certainly a grotesque transformation, if effected in the manner proposed by those pessimistic prophets Demolins and Lemaître. France (they say) must have colonial expansion! The Anglo-Saxon is the only successful expansionist; we must _Anglo-Saxonize_ France! They forget that the Anglo-Saxon himself is indebted for his success as a colonist and trader to the Scandinavian Frenchmen who colonized England under William the Conqueror, and that it was not until the Norman's demoniac spirit of "enterprise" took possession of the Anglo-Saxon thegns and ceorls that they even felt the impulse to "go down to the sea in ships." Later, too, they should remember, there was an _industrial_ colonization of England by the Frenchmen who were relentlessly expatriated in the days of the dragonades. What France then lost has never been fully regained. When she lost the Norman element in its early Scandinavian form, her capacity for colonial expansion was seriously impaired. When she colonized England by an indiscriminate exclusion of the Huguenots from her own soil, her capacity for normal evolution was lost. The recanting or subjugated element that remained is probably represented by the prescriptive "free-thinking" anti-clerical element of to-day. The profane spirit of the English "Bigod" had been imported into the religion of France, and "bigotry" may discredit the claims of the noblest faith. The extreme reactionary result in this instance is an intolerant _unbelief_, passing at times into a ferocious contempt for country, constitutions, and creeds.