The Evolution of an Empire | Page 2

the same
mysterious branch of the human family as the Basques and Iberians,
whose presence in Southern Europe has never been explained.
When the Aryan came and blotted out these races will perhaps always
remain an unanswered question. But while Greece was clothing herself
with a mantle of beauty, which the world for two thousand years has
striven in vain to imitate, there was lying off the North and West coasts
of the European Continent a group of mist-enshrouded islands of which
she had never heard.
Obscured by fogs, and beyond the horizon of Civilization, a branch of
the Aryan race known as Britons were there leading lives as primitive
as the American Indians, dwelling in huts shaped like beehives, which
they covered with branches and plastered with mud. While Phidias was
carving immortal statues for the Parthenon, this early Britisher was
decorating his abode with the heads of his enemies; and could those
shapeless blocks at Stonehenge speak, they would, perhaps, tell of cruel
and hideous Druidical rites witnessed on Salisbury Plain, ages ago.

[Sidenote: Caesar's Invasion, 55 B.C. Britain a Roman Province, 45
A.D. Boadicea 61 A.D.]
Rumors of the existence of this people reached the Mediterranean three
or four hundred years before Christ, but not until Caesar's invasion of
the Island (55 B.C.) was there any positive knowledge of them.
The actual conquest of Britain was not one of Caesar's achievements.
But from the moment when his covetous eagle-eye viewed the
chalk-cliffs of Dover from the coast of Northern Gaul, its fate was
sealed. The Roman octopus from that moment had fastened its tentacles
upon the hapless land; and in 45 A.D., under the Emperor Claudius, it
became a Roman province. In vain did the Britons struggle for forty
years. In vain did the heroic Boadicea (during the reign of Nero, 61
A.D.), like Hermann in Germany, and Vercingetorix in France, resist
the destruction of her nation by the Romans. In vain did this woman
herself lead the Britons, in a frenzy of patriotism; and when the
inevitable defeat came, and London was lost, with the desperate
courage of barbarian she destroyed herself rather than witness the
humiliation of her race.
The stately Westminster and St. Paul's did not look down upon this
heroic daughter of Britain. London at that time was a collection of
miserable huts and entrenched cattle-pens, which were in Keltic speech
called the "Fort-on-the-Lake"--or "Llyndin," an uncouth name in Latin
ears, which gave little promise of the future London, the Romans
helping it to its final form by calling it Londinium.
But the octopus had firmly closed about its victim, whose struggles,
before the year 100 A.D., had practically ceased. A civilization which
made no effort to civilize was forcibly planted upon the island. Where
had been the humble village, protected by a ditch and felled trees, there
arose the walled city, with temples and baths and forum, and stately
villas with frescoed walls and tessellated floors, and hot-air currents
converting winter into summer.
So Chester, Colchester, Lincoln, York, London, and a score of other
cities were set like jewels in a surface of rough clay, the Britons filling
in the intervening spaces with their own rude customs, habits, and
manners. Dwelling in wretched cabins thatched with straw and chinked
with mud, they still stubbornly maintained their own uncouth speech
and nationality, while they helplessly saw all they could earn

swallowed up in taxes and tributes by their insatiate conquerors. The
Keltic-Gauls might, if they would, assimilate this Roman civilization,
but not so the Keltic-Britons.
The two races dwelt side by side, but separate (except to some extent in
the cities), or, if possible, the vanquished retreated before the
vanquisher into Wales and Cornwall; and there to-day are found the
only remains of the aboriginal Briton race in England.
The Roman General Agricola had built in 78 A.D. a massive wall
across the North of England, extending from sea to sea, to protect the
Roman territory from the Picts and Scots, those wild dwellers in the
Northern Highlands. It seems to us a frail barrier to a people
accustomed to leaping the rocky wall set by nature between the North
and the South; and unless it were maintained by a line of legions
extending its entire length, they must have laughed at such a defence;
even when duplicated later, as it was, by the Emperor Hadrian, in 120
A.D.; and still twice again, first by Emperor Antoninus, and then by
Severus. For the swift transportation of troops in the defensive warfare
always carried on with the Picts and Scots, magnificent roads were
built, which linked the Romanized cities together in a network of
splendid highways.
There were more than three centuries of peace. Agriculture, commerce,
and industries came into existence. "Wealth accumulated," but the
Briton