King Alfred of England | Page 7

them. That there have been
some great and noble specimens of humanity among the African race,
for example, no one can deny; but that there is a marked, and fixed, and
permanent constitutional difference between them and the Caucasian
race seems evident from this fact, that for two thousand years each has
held its own continent, undisturbed, in a great degree, by the rest of
mankind; and while, during all this time, no nation of the one race has
risen, so far as is known, above the very lowest stage of civilization,
there have been more than fifty entirely distinct and independent
civilizations originated and fully developed in the other. For three
thousand years the Caucasian race have continued, under all
circumstances, and in every variety of situation, to exhibit the same
traits and the same indomitable prowess. No calamities, however
great--no desolating wars, no destructive pestilence, no wasting famine,
no night of darkness, however universal and gloomy--has ever been
able to keep them long in degradation or barbarism. There is not now a
barbarous people to be found in the whole race, and there has not been
one for a thousand years.
Nearly all the great exploits, and achievements too, which have
signalized the history of the world, have been performed by this branch
of the human family. They have given celebrity to every age in which
they have lived, and to every country that they have ever possessed, by
some great deed, or discovery, or achievement, which their intellectual
energies have accomplished. As Egyptians, they built the Pyramids,
and reared enormous monoliths, which remain as perfect now as they
were when first completed, thirty centuries ago. As Ph[oe]nicians, they
constructed ships, perfected navigation, and explored, without compass
or chart, every known sea. As Greeks, they modeled architectural
embellishments, and cut sculptures in marble, and wrote poems and
history, which have been ever since the admiration of the world. As
Romans, they carried a complete and perfect military organization over
fifty nations and a hundred millions of people, with one supreme
mistress over all, the ruins of whose splendid palaces and monuments

have not yet passed away. Thus has this race gone on, always
distinguishing itself, by energy, activity, and intellectual power,
wherever it has dwelt, whatever language it has spoken, and in
whatever period of the world it has lived. It has invented printing, and
filled every country that it occupies with permanent records of the past,
accessible to all. It has explored the heavens, and reduced to precise
and exact calculations all the complicated motions there. It has
ransacked the earth, systematized, arranged, and classified the vast
melange of plants, and animals, and mineral products to be found upon
its surface. It makes steam and falling water do more than half the work
necessary for feeding and clothing the human race; and the howling
winds of the ocean, the very emblems of resistless destruction and
terror, it steadily employs in interchanging the products of the world,
and bearing the means of comfort and plenty to every clime.
The Caucasian race has thus, in all ages, and in all the varieties of
condition in which the different branches of it have been placed,
evinced the same great characteristics, marking the existence of some
innate and constant constitutional superiority; and yet, in the different
branches, subordinate differences appear, which are to be accounted for,
perhaps, partly by difference of circumstances, and partly, perhaps, by
similar constitutional diversities--diversities by which one branch is
distinguished from other branches, as the whole race is from the other
races with which we have compared them. Among these branches, we,
Anglo-Saxons ourselves, claim for the Anglo-Saxons the superiority
over all the others.
The Anglo-Saxons commenced their career as pirates and robbers, and
as pirates and robbers of the most desperate and dangerous description.
In fact, the character which the Anglo-Saxons have obtained in modern
times for energy and enterprise, and for desperate daring in their
conflicts with foes, is no recent fame. The progenitors of the present
race were celebrated every where, and every where feared and dreaded,
not only in the days of Alfred, but several centuries before. All the
historians of those days that speak of them at all, describe them as
universally distinguished above their neighbors for their energy and
vehemence of character, their mental and physical superiority, and for

the wild and daring expeditions to which their spirit of enterprise and
activity were continually impelling them. They built vessels, in which
they boldly put forth on the waters of the German Ocean or of the
Baltic Sea on excursions for conquest or plunder. Like their present
posterity on the British isles and on the shores of the Atlantic, they
cared not, in these voyages, whether it was summer or winter, calm or