of the ancient Germans.  The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition.  But there is one that is apparent and extremely instructive.  There is sometimes a great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions.  In America the Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain; and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers settled here as in an empty country.  They were not obliged to modify their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes. [Sidenote:  Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]

This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of the Teutonic settlement of Britain.  Whether the English invaders really slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide.  It is enough to point out one respect in which the Teutonic conquest was immeasurably more complete in Britain than in any other part of the empire.  Everywhere else the tribes who settled upon Roman soil—­the Goths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians—­were christianized, and so to some extent romanized, before they came to take possession.  Even the more distant Franks had been converted to Christianity before they had completed their conquest of Gaul.  Everywhere except in Britain, therefore, the conquerors had already imbibed Roman ideas, and the authority of Rome was in a certain sense acknowledged.  There was no break in the continuity of political events.  In Britain, on the other hand, there was a complete break, so that while on the continent the fifth and sixth centuries are seen in the full midday light of history, in Britain they have lapsed into the twilight of half-legendary tradition.  The Saxon and English tribes, coming from the remote wilds of northern Germany, whither Roman missionaries had not yet penetrated, still worshipped Thor and Wodan; and their conquest of Britain was effected with such deadly thoroughness that Christianity was destroyed there, or lingered only in sequestered nooks.  A land once christianized thus actually fell back into paganism, so that the work of converting it to Christianity had to be done over again.  From the landing of heathen Hengest on the isle of Thanet to the landing of Augustine and his monks on the same spot, one hundred and forty-eight years elapsed, during which English institutions found time to take deep root in British soil with scarcely more interference, as to essential points, than in American soil twelve centuries afterward. [Sidenote:  Peculiarity of the Teutonic conquest of Britain]