the world of Rome. In every age the history of Britain is the
history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of
itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are
speaking, not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons
parted from their kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the
common influences of an island world. The land has seen several
settlements from outside, but the settlers have always been brought
under the spell of their insular position. Whenever settlement has
not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the
existing people of the land. When it has meant displacement, they
have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left
behind by characteristics which were the direct result of
settlement in an island world.

The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England,
has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated
from without. But each of those elements has done somewhat to
modify the mass into which it was absorbed. The English land and
nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later
times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German
Palatine. Still less are they as they might have been, if they had
not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and
the Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the character
and destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed.
The conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in
the greater mass of the English people; still we can never be as if
the Norman had never come among us. We ever bear about us the
signs of his presence. Our colonists have carried those signs with
them into distant lands, to remind men that settlers in America and
Australia came from a land which the Norman once entered as a