No language can better express the facts of the case in point, than the following review by Macaulay: "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind, which produced a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste, separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries this wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw; have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe; have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo; have created a maritime power which would annihilate, in a quarter of an hour, the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa, together; have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion, and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical; have produced a literature abounding with works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies; have speculated with exquisite subtlety on the operations of the human mind; have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of human improvement."