A GREAT civilization has spread over the earth. Many millions of people believe it the best that has yet appeared. In it the faiths and strivings of a strong race are expressed. History teaches that it will be assailed by rival civilizations. Must it fall and its people be led into the bondage of alien ways?
The date at which a civilization begins must always be unknown, so slowly and steadily do the contributing forces operate. The birth of even so definite an organization as a nation is a matter of opinion. The United States of America, for example, may be regarded as having come into being on July 4, 1776, or at the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, or at the end of the French War in 1763, or on anyone of various other dates, according to the historical bias of the chronicler. But before records now legible to us were made, the Pan-Angles were long past their beginning stages.
Thousands of years ago Europe emerged from the {2} glacial ice. Off its western coast lay islands. The largest was close to the continent, and whatever peoples made their way into Europe had no great difficulty in crossing the narrow water. Migration must have followed migration, as continental tribes, more progressive than the islanders, came with superior weapons and skill to conquer and colonize. Bronze drove out flint and iron overcame bronze. Settlements of invaders assimilated with the subject natives and themselves became natives to the next foreign exploiter. The resulting people became known to the Romans as Britons. Rome's traders saw that the land was worth possessing.
In the middle of the first century A.D., Imperial Rome was in a mood for further expansion. It became necessary to intervene in the affairs of the northern island, touched already by Roman influence, but as yet independent of that power. In the island there were many princes and many governments adequate to the local demands, but no organization for concerted action against a powerful intruder. Within fifty years the task of pacification was largely accomplished. The southern two-thirds of the land then enjoyed the beneficent rule of Roman administrators. They governed Britain for its own good--as they saw it. They made it as much as possible like Rome. Baths and temples, roads and bridges, and a firm law brought Roman enlightenment to uncultured Britain. The Latin tongue was the official language. Many Romans of the military and civil services married native women. For more than two centuries Britain was thus a dependency of Rome, and many Britons were proud to belong to the {3} great empire. The rest of the island, to which this boon was never extended, was inhabited by barbarous hill tribes, who, even when Rome was strong, could protect themselves, and who at favourable opportunities made raids against the loyal Britons. The Romans had come to Britain to rule it, but had remained Romans, had taken their orders from colonial secretaries in Rome, had left their Roman wives and children at home--presumably because of the severity of Britain's climate,--and after an honourable term of service had retired on half-pay, or something as good. Just how Rome profited by holding Britain is immaterial now, whether by tribute levied and collected directly, whether through extended opportunities for trade, or whether in the employment ("outdoor relief," a Canadian might put it [3-11]) of a large military and civil force, paid, if Britain were self-supporting, by Britain's taxes. Perhaps the knowledge of having discharged a duty, shirking not the burden of the strong, was the reward Rome really prized.
A change of rulers was, however, in store for them all--Briton and Roman alike. By 350 A.D. a huge amorphous rival had begun to overflow its Northern forest, a race of strong, eager men seeking more land. That their first attacks were toward Rome itself showed the empire's weakness. Rome's intentions toward outlying dependencies may have been of the best, but it was powerless to fulfil them. The navy, such as it was, was forced to concentrate in home waters; and the army, called to protect the heart of the empire, left empty the barracks of Britain.
Then, on the disorganized Britain, borne by the north-east wind, fell the invaders. With them came many of our most cherished virtues and a new epoch of governmental theory. The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Norsemen came, not to superimpose themselves as rulers, but to colonize. They brought their families along. The climate suited them nicely. They wanted to live there and make the country their country. The fact that it was already inhabited formed only a temporary obstacle. As has happened repeatedly in history, those who came were strong; those they found were weak. The right of prior occupation was matched against the right to take by force. In time the natives had disappeared and the newcomers were settling and improving the land. There was no looking back to a mother country for orders or protection. Their fathers across the North Sea had evolved certain governmental ideas. These the migrating generations had carried with them and planted in the new soil. They proved adequate; and if any tie bound the lusty offspring to the ancestral home it could have been sentiment only--unencouraged by written and electric communication. The sentiment was short-lived.
Of these separate colonies there were as many as there were tribes, and as many tribes as there were shiploads. They all came from the great Teutonic stock that covered so much of north-western Europe. Five hundred years they spent trying conclusions among themselves, deciding what should be the language, the law, the name, they were to hand down to us. The people long remained without any name common to all; but in time {5} their country became known as England. Here were established the characteristics that have marked us ever since. The framework of the language was set; the greed for land was indulged; and the instinct for self-government, unable to evolve for its own security any system of central control, proved finally the undoing of all the jealous little autonomies. When a single-minded force threatened their cherished liberties, they were capable of no single-minded resistance. A neighbour across the channel thought he could make good use of England, proved his point one day when the wind blew favourably towards Hastings, and became England's master.
Then began a new governmental era, one having no parallel in our history since. The Saxon had been in most recent supremacy. Wealth and power passed from Saxon to Norman hands. Had the Duchy of Normandy been large enough to form the centre of its ruler's activities, England, like the Britain of the past, would have become a dependency of a foreign power. Two factors prevented: England, because of its size and of its separation from the continent was the more valued possession of the two; and William and his followers, although considering themselves greatly superior in culture and breeding, were really of the same race as the men they conquered, and hence easily assimilated with them. Had this been an invasion of people, that is, of men with their wives and children--it must have meant extermination of the Angles, Saxons, and Danes, either in war or in economic strife. But no such colonizing force was at work. The lords of England were reduced {6} to peasantry, and the peasants of whatever origin kept on about their affairs. In time the new nobility was no longer foreign. Neither a dependency, nor a colony, England gradually absorbed the Normans and all the importance of Normandy.
From this assimilation England rose independent and a unit. The Normans, it has been said, crushed the Angles, Danes, and Saxons into one people.[6-1] Just as inexorably were the Normans themselves fused into the common mass--
"Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman: . . . The silent nations undistinguish'd fall, An Englishman's the common name for all. Fate jumbled them together, God knows how; Whate'er they were, they're true-born English now."[6-2]
Out of the vigour and strength that resulted have risen the Pan-Angles; and no foreign power since then has conquered or ruled them in England or elsewhere. With several governmental units co-ordinated to no central authority, England had been devastated and had been unable to repel invasions. These local powers were now combined under a strong unitary government. So efficient did it prove for many generations, that Pan-Angles as a whole are only now realising its limitations. For five centuries no change in circumstances warranted the consideration of any other.
Suddenly, in a few years, everything changed except the minds of men. The world began to {7} grow, and Europe was staggered by the knowledge of areas immeasurable as compared to the lands previously known. England then began to take its place as a great nation. In 1497 a ship, financed by Bristol merchants, discovered Newfoundland,[7-1] and the sea-divided control of the Pan-Angles was foreshadowed. From this date, perhaps, Pan-Angle history may most conveniently be reckoned. If so, four hundred and seventeen years lie behind us. Of these the first hundred are negligible. That was an age of fable, when the children of Europe went out on lonely quests and staked their lives in adventure for prizes whose value they could never know. Men left England and circled the globe; they fished in distant waters;[7-2] they bartered with strange peoples; but in the main they returned again to England. No colonial policy was required to meet their needs.
After 1600, however, they less often returned. They settled the new lands, and grew great in wealth and population. They organized governments and huge instruments of trade. Slowly the fabric grew that was to dwarf England in size and resources, and England, failing to understand that it was no loser thereby, but richer as a part of a {8} strengthening Pan-Angle civilization, found little light on the problems arising. In 1607 Virginia and in 1620 Massachusetts were permanently settled.[8-1] During the same years Englishmen were acquiring titles and trading rights in India. Here, at the outset, we have all the elements that long made for obscurity and discord.
In Virginia and Massachusetts the land was suitable for the occupations and for the breeding of white men. These settlements were typical of many in North America, South Africa, and Australasia. The settler changed his latitude and longitude, but little else. He pushed back the natives, from the land he desired to use, gave the place an English name, and proceeded about his affairs with his fundamental ideals, habits, and institutions unaltered. He brought from England, besides furniture and bricks for his house, his language, his religion, and his notions of government. These he preserved and handed down to his children, who in turn thought and behaved as though Englanders, and in two localities, a hemisphere apart, named their land New England. Self-government was one of their inherited ideas; they believed that he who supports the government with taxes should be represented therein. Settlements such as these are here distinguished as colonies. The first sprang from England, and in some cases have themselves been the prolific parents of new colonies. But of whatever origin, all are a product of the individualism of the Pan-Angle civilization. In them self-government {9} has been a question of time only. "Assemblies were not formally instituted, but grew of themselves because it was the nature of Englishmen to assemble. Thus the old historian of the colonies Hutchinson, writes under the year 1619, 'This year a House of Burgesses broke out in Virginia.'"[9-1] However strongly such colonies may be attached by sentimental and political ties to some other governmental group, they belong to themselves alone. On terms of equality they are part of the Pan-Angle power that controls the world.
