By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



Ill 



Britain could never have been very numerous. They must have 

 been few in numbers and extremely scattered at the period we are 

 considering", though they may have increased numerically by the 

 Roman invasion : still at no time could they have attained to the 

 "immense multitudes both of men and cattle" which Caesar and 

 Tacitus record, 1 and which, I think, we may fairly set down to the 

 exaggeration in which the heathen conqueror, in order to enhance 

 the grandeur of his own victories, seldom hesitated to indulge. 8 



Neither must we expect to find among those early settlers any 

 regularly organized form of government. They probably consisted, 

 (after the fashion of almost all the earliest colonists) 3 of free and 

 wandering tribes, scattered here and there, independant of one 

 another, and oftentimes at war with one another, as encroachment 

 on their respective ill- defined territories, or other supposed causes 

 of difference arose, very much as is the case at present among the 

 numerous Indian tribes of British North America. 4 The patriarchal 

 (the most ancient form of government, wherein fathers and heads 

 of families, were the sovereigns,) was at first the only rule they 

 knew : 5 and as in course of time alliances for mutual defence were 

 formed amongst several clans, petty kingdoms grew up under one 

 ruler, to which state of advancement some of them had arrived at 

 the period of the Roman conquest. 



What few laws they possessed were never written, but couched 

 in verse and committed to memory ; 6 a method by no means peculiar 



1 Caesar Comment : de Bell: Gall : lib. v., cap. 12. 

 Tacitus Annal: lib. xiv., cap. 34. 



Xiphilin ex Dione in Neron. 



2 Compare Rawlinson's Exposure of the exaggeration of Xerxes' forces, as 

 given in Herodotus (vol. iv., p. 158). 



3 Herodotus, book i., chap. 125. 

 Cartes' History of England, p. 76. 



Sharon Turner's History of England, vol. i., p. 23. 



4 See Four years in British Columbia and Vancouvers Island, by Commander 

 Mayne, 1862, chap, xi., pp. 242—305. 



Tyrrell's History of England, vol. i., pp. 16, 23. 



5 Genesis, passim. 



Henry's History of Great Britain, vol. i., p. 237, ii., p. 2. 



6 Camden's Britannia, p. 4. 

 Cartes' History of England, p. 34. 



