’The women doubtless would be largely spared’!—­But I thank the Professor for teaching me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what I am driving at.  The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did not extirpate the Britons, whatever you may hold concerning the Romans.  For, once again, men do not behave in that way, and certainly will not when a live slave is worth money.  Secondly, the very horror with which men spoke, centuries after, of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a wholesale massacre was exceptional, monstrous.  If not exceptional, monstrous, why should this particular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably in their memories?  Finally,—­and to be as curt as the question deserves—­the Celtic Briton in the island was not exterminated and never came near to being exterminated:  but on the contrary, remains equipollent with the Saxon in our blood, and perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we call Iberian, which came before either and endures in this island to-day, as anyone travelling it with eyes in his head can see.  Pict, Dane, Norman, Frisian, Huguenot French—­these and others come in.  If mixture of blood be a shame, we have purchased at the price of that shame the glory of catholicism; and I know of nothing more false in science or more actively poisonous in politics or in the arts than the assumption that we belong as a race to the Teutonic family.

Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot—­they all come in.  And will you refuse a hearing when I claim that the Roman came in too?  Bethink you how deeply Rome engraved itself on this island and its features.  Bethink you that, as human nature is, no conquering race ever lived or could live—­even in garrison—­among a tributary one without begetting children on it.  Bethink you yet further of Freeman’s admission that in the wholesale (and quite hypothetical) general massacre ’the women doubtless would be largely spared’; and you advance nearer to my point.  I see a people which for four hundred years was permeated by Rome.  If you insist on its being a Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you have one which alone of Teutonic peoples has inherited the Roman gift of consolidating conquest, of colonising in the wake of its armies; of driving the road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under its sense of law.  I see that this nation of ours concurrently, when it seeks back to what alone can inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back, not to any supposed native North, but south to the Middle Sea of our civilisation and steadily to Italy, which we understand far more easily than France—­though France has helped us times and again.  Putting these things together, I retort upon the ethnologists—­for I come from the West of England, where we suffer incredible things from them—­’Semper ego auditor tantum?’ I hazard that the most important thing in our blood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome.

You must, of course, take this for nothing more than it pretends to be—­a conjecture, a suggestion.  I will follow it up with two statements of fact, neither doubtful nor disputable.