When our wild German forefathers, Saxon, Danish or Frisian, landed in Britain and mingled their blood with the remnant of wild Britons who inhabited the fastnesses of the land, there was one great treasure common to all the barbarian peoples of Europe and Central Asia which they carried with them, the tradition and fact of personal freedom. The Greeks and the Romans believed themselves free; it was the freedom of an enfranchized minority reigning despotically over a vast body of women and slaves, and Athens, in her noblest days, contained thirty thousand free adult males, while her population numbered hundreds of thousands. In Eastern civilization the proportion of free men was generally smaller, and the absolutely free and independent individual in the nations was sometimes only the solitary despot who ruled. This is never the case with a nomadic people who, if they take captives, have no land for them to labour on, and no dungeons in which to confine them, and whose women and captives of war are therefore always more or less independent. Most of all was this so with our German ancestors, whose women were the most honoured part of the nation, supposed to possess a knowledge and insight which made their advice necessary on every great national question, who accompanied their husbands in peace and war, who gave them as wedding gifts no rose or lock of hair, but a sword and shield which were the man's most precious possessions throughout life, whose scorn and reproach were what the coward most dreaded, and who again and again led the tribes to conflict and victory, as when Velleda, the white-haired priestess, led the Germanic troops to Italy; and whose captives, when by rare chance they kept them alive, were in turn incorporated in the general body.