with them their wives, their children, and their portable effects,
determined to win a settlement amid the fertile regions owned and
improved by the Romans.

These incursions were not colonization in the sense in which Rome
understood it; they were the migrations of a people, and were as
full, as complete, and as extensive as the Israelitish invasion of
Canaan--they were more destructive of property, but less fatal to
life. These migratory hosts left a desert behind them, and they
either gained a settlement or perished. The Roman colonies
preserved their connection with the parent stem, and invoked aid
when in need; but the barbarian hosts had no home, no reserves.
Other races, moving with similar intent, settled on the land they
had vacated. These brought their own social arrangements, and it is
very difficult to connect the land system established by the
aborigines with the system which, after a lapse of some hundreds of
years, was found to prevail in another tribe or nation which had
occupied the region that had been vacated.

Neither Caesar nor Tacitus gives us any idea of the habits or
usages of the people who lived north of the Belgae. They had no
notion of Scandinavia nor of Sclavonia. The Walhalla of the north,
with its terrific deities, was unknown to them; and I am disposed
to think that we shall look in vain among the customs of the
Teutons for the basis from whence came the polity established in
England by the invaders of the fifth century. The ANGLO-SAXONs came
from a region north of the Elbe, which we call Schleswig--Holstein.
They were kindred to the Norwegians and the Danes, and of the
family of the sea robbers; they were not Teutons, for the Teutons
were not and are not sailors. The Belgae colonized part of the