An English scholar of sound judgment and exceptionally sound views has recently said that the Emperor Napoleon was the greatest administrator of all time. His greatest work, perhaps, is the system of administrative centralization which, through a century of the severest tests that political madness could apply, has maintained the conditions of social order even in the midst of war and under every form of organized misrule, and secured almost unparalleled prosperity for the municipalities and provinces of France. But it must not be forgotten that William the Norman solved a like problem with apparently even greater success, and under antagonizing conditions which only a statesman of original genius could successfully confront. Not for one century, only, of marvelous effectiveness in civic administration, but for eight hundred years of advancing and expanding civilization, the conceptions evolved by the Norman's brain have been doing their beneficent work; and great as was the genius of the Corsican adventurer, it is not incredible that even he, the master of Europe, did not disdain the lesson which had been taught the nations by that magnificent Son of France. The Corsican was a close student of military history, and secretly meditated a descent upon modern England in imitation of the earlier Conqueror's work. It is not likely that he would overlook the methods of reorganization that followed the war, with its machinery of sheriffs, judges, justiciaries, etc.—executive officers directly responsible to the king—bringing the throne in direct touch with the people, and drawing every subject, at least in every central shire, in direct personal allegiance to the throne. The Marquessess, or wardens of the Marches, were able and ambitious warriors whose sole concern was with dangers from without. But even Napoleon could not foresee, in this guarded initiatory recognition of the landowner, the ultimate evolution of a territorial democracy that was to affect the political and social destinies of the English race. Monarchs of a later date—Henry the Eighth and his masterful daughter Elizabeth—saw in the people the sole source of power; and the loyal Englishman even of this generation will proudly tell you that in his country the sole fountain of honor is the king. There were at least two American statesmen who were illustrious disciples of the Norman's political school. They were men of Norman blood, who wrought in American statecraft with the Norman's constructive brain—and there was still another of the same imperial strain who, with a philosophic conception of all that was of value in the principles of Anglo-Norman administration and a just appreciation by actual experience of government as a practical art, never failed throughout a long, brilliant, and successful career to teach the doctrine that the People Themselves were the sole fountain of honor and the exclusive source of power—a principle in the philosophy of government and in political administration equally patent to William the Conqueror, when he anxiously sought a declaration of "personal" allegiance from the subjects in that great gathering of potential "sovereigns" upon Salisbury Plain. In the long succession of administrators that followed the Norman king, there was none that seems to have grasped so completely and applied so skillfully his principles and methods of political administration as a daughter of the Tudor race. She may not have loved the people in any modern sense; but she knew their power, she recognized their rights; she studied their interests, and her jeweled finger was always upon their pulse. The best of all treatment, she thought, was to anticipate with soothing remedies the rude distempers of the times. She considered rather the Constitution of the Subject than the Constitution of the State; since, collectively, one embraced the other.

Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his admirable work, "A Literary History of America," discourses with great brilliancy and charm upon the Elizabethan influences that governed in a large measure the development of the Puritan and the Virginian race. The reader of the present paper will note with curious interest the bearing of the following quotations from this work upon the theories which the present writer has discussed. "Broadly speaking," he says, "all our Northern colonies were developed from those planted in Massachusetts; and all our Southern from that planted in Virginia." The statement is "socially" true, he says, to an extraordinary degree. The Elizabethan type of character "displayed a marked power of assimilating whatever came within its influence." This trait, akin to that which centuries before had made the conquered English slowly but surely assimilate their Norman conquerors, the Yankees of our own day have not quite lost. Our native type still "absorbs" the foreign. The children of immigrants insensibly become native. The irresistible power of a common language and of the common ideals which underlie it still dominates. This tendency, he adds, declared itself from the earliest settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth. "North and South alike may be regarded as regions finally settled by Elizabethan Englishmen." The dominant traits of the English race of that time were "spontaneity, enthusiasm, and versatility." But the Elizabethan English of Virginia, he says, were notably different in this: they were men of a less "austere" type of character than their compatriots of the North; of more adventurous "instincts," and were "men of action" as the New Englanders were "men of God." The peculiar power of assimilation and the "pristine alertness of mind" were the same in both. The economic superiority of the North was manifest; the political ability of the South seemed generally superior. Pleasantly putting aside the traditional claims of exclusive "cavalier" descent, Mr. Wendell says: "At least up to the Civil War the personal temper of the better classes in the South remained more like that of the better classes in Seventeenth Century England than anything else in the modern world." He frankly concedes that the most eminent statesmen of Colonial and Revolutionary days were Virginians. Recalling what has been said in regard to the constitutional sluggishness of the Anglo-Saxon, his mental inertness, his settled or stereotyped habits of thought, and his absolute lack of racial initiative until the Norman came, we read the following passage from Mr. Wendell with curious interest: "Such literature as the English world has left us bespeaks a public whose spontaneous alertness of mind, whose instant perception of every subtle variety of phrase and allusion, was more akin to that of our contemporary French than to anything which we are now accustomed to consider native to insular England." This transformation Mr. Wendell attributes to "the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of the English temperament," in the spacious Elizabethan days. What has produced or determined this extraordinary differentiation of race? What are the original, genetic factors behind this varied manifestation of power in that old, Elizabethan stock? With the advent of the Seventeenth Century; with the turbulence, and trouble, and austerity of Cromwellian days; with migrations following Cromwellian war; with the evolution of a transatlantic type of the English race, there came an end to those spacious and splendid days—to the creative, prolific epoch of the Virgin Queen.

The most trivial fact that connects the name of Shakespeare with Virginia is of interest to the Virginian and his multitudinous clans. Captain Newport, Vice-Admiral of Virginia, commanded the ship Sea Adventure, which was wrecked on the Devil's Islands. Sir George Somers, sitting on the poop and misled by a flaming apparition on the masts, unconsciously guided the vessel in a fatal course. William Strachey, "Secretary in Virginia," wrote the account of the "Tempest" published in Purchas. Thus was the "king's ship" boarded and burned by the spirit Ariel at the command of his master Prospero, and wrecked on those "Bermoothes" which are "still vext" by that rude, tempestuous sea. It is of interest, too, to note that the special Supervisors and Directors of this Elizabethan colony were William Shakespeare's friends—the Earl of Southampton; the Earl of Pembroke; the Earl of Montgomery; Viscount Lisle (brother of Sir Philip Sidney); Lord Howard of Walden; Lord Sheffield; and Lord Carew of Clopton, who sold Shakespeare, in 1597, the house in which he lived till 1616—all of them Elizabethan cavaliers derived from Anglo-Norman stock. There is another Elizabethan name of still greater interest to all people of the Anglo-Virginian race—Sir Edwin Sandys, the author of the political charters upon which the free institutions of Virginia rest; and not only Virginia, but the United States. Educated at Geneva and the son of an English Archbishop, he was thoroughly seasoned with the doctrines of the Genevan school; and aimed not only to found the American Republic on Genevan lines by the creation of a "free state" on the Atlantic coast, but to make ample provision in the charter itself for the ultimate "expansion" of the young republic toward the Pacific Ocean. This statement may not, even yet, be universally accepted; but it is incontestably true.