First of all, I shall take sides with Mr. Freeman in eschewing altogether the word “Anglo-Saxon.”  The term is sufficiently absurd and misleading as applied in England to the Old-English speech of our forefathers, or to that portion of English history which is included between the fifth and the eleventh centuries.  But in America it is frequently used, not indeed by scholars, but by popular writers and speakers, in a still more loose and slovenly way.  In the war of independence our great-great-grandfathers, not yet having ceased to think of themselves as Englishmen, used to distinguish themselves as “Continentals,” while the king’s troops were known as the “British.”  The quaint term “Continental” long ago fell into disuse, except in the slang phrase “not worth a Continental” which referred to the debased condition of our currency at the close of the Revolutionary War; but “American” and “British” might still serve the purpose sufficiently whenever it is necessary to distinguish between the two great English nationalities.  The term “English,” however, is so often used with sole reference to people and things in England as to have become in some measure antithetical to “American;” and when it is found desirable to include the two in a general expression, one often hears in America the term “Anglo-Saxon” colloquially employed for this purpose.  A more slovenly use of language can hardly be imagined.  Such a compound term as “Anglo-American” might perhaps be logically defensible, but that has already become restricted to the English-descended inhabitants of the United States and Canada alone, in distinction from Spanish Americans and red Indians.  It is never so used as to include Englishmen.  Refraining from all such barbarisms, I prefer to call the English race by the name which it has always applied to itself, from the time when it inhabited the little district of Angeln on the Baltic coast of Sleswick down to the time when it had begun to spread itself over three great continents.  It is a race which has shown a rare capacity for absorbing slightly foreign elements and moulding them into conformity with a political type that was first wrought out through centuries of effort on British soil; and this capacity it has shown perhaps in a heightened degree in the peculiar circumstances in which it has been placed in America.  The American has absorbed considerable quantities of closely kindred European blood, but he is rapidly assimilating it all, and in his political habits and aptitudes he remains as thoroughly English as his forefathers in the days of De Montfort, or Hampden, or Washington.  Premising this, we may go on to consider some aspects of the work which the English race has done and is doing in the world, and we need not feel discouraged if, in order to do justice to the subject, we have to take our start far back in ancient history.  We shall begin, it may be said, somewhere near the primeval chaos, and though we shall indeed stop short of the day of judgment, we shall hope at all events to reach the millennium.