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The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) by Various
page 10 of 537 (01%)
ever-present and increasing power and blessing to the world.

David J. Brewer



THE ORATORY OF ANGLO-SAXON COUNTRIES

By Edward A. Allen, Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Literature
in the University of Missouri

English-speaking people have always been the freest people, the
greatest lovers of liberty, the world has ever seen. Long before
English history properly begins, the pen of Tacitus reveals to us
our forefathers in their old home-land in North Germany beating back
the Roman legions under Varus, and staying the progress of Rome's
triumphant car whose mighty wheels had crushed Hannibal, Jugurtha,
Vercingetorix, and countless thousands in every land. The Germanic
ancestors of the English nation were the only people who did not
bend the neck to these lords of all the world besides. In the year
9, when the Founder of Christianity was playing about his humble
home at Nazareth, or watching his father at work in his shop, our
forefathers dealt Rome a blow from which she never recovered. As
Freeman, late professor of history at Oxford, said in one of his
lectures: "In the blow by the Teutoburg wood was the germ of the
Declaration of Independence, the germ of the surrender of Yorktown."
Arminius was our first Washington, "_haud_ _dubie_ _liberator_," as
Tacitus calls him,--the savior of his country.

When the time came for expansion, and our forefathers in the fifth
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