ORIGIN OF OUR RACE. 255 



the lying capabilities of the one historian whom they 

 trust, can only explain the eradication of the Britons 

 by supposing a stubbornness in that people quite in- 

 consistent with the feebleness and effeminacy alleged 

 as the reason of the appeal to Hengist. Such historians 

 seem to imagine that a stubborn, well-armed people, 

 largely surpassing their invaders in number, could as 

 easily be swept into the western corners of the island 

 as one might sponge out the colours of a twelve-inch 

 map. All the evidence which history gives or rather 

 suggests is overlooked, because the ancient language 

 gave place to the Anglo-Saxon ; as if it were not easier 

 to suppose that the Saxons forced the conquered to 

 speak their language than to suppose that they were 

 so stupid as to kill or drive out the people who made 

 the chief value of their conquest. But we need not 

 consider probabilities. In these days there are two 

 great tests of race one of high value, the other un- 

 mistakable. If they had given concordant evidence in 

 this case, I suppose we should not have been misled 

 even by that mistaken patriotism which makes some 

 historians anxious to forget the true ancestry of their 

 people when that ancestry is not to their taste, much 

 as a patrician might foolishly prefer to blot out from 

 the family genealogy the record of an ancestor's 

 marriage with a ' lass of low degree,' even though 

 some of the best qualities in his own blood and temper 

 might have been derived from that despised source. 

 Unfortunately the two forms of evidence point different 

 ways. By the test of language we should be judged 



