When the great Gothic column of migration, sweeping past the Caspian and crossing the Asian frontier, followed the river valleys and the shores of the Baltic Sea, making a reconnoissance in force that reached as far as the waters of the northern sea, it pushed its exploring columns through every part of Scandinavia, peopling every shore it passed, and leaving every promontory and peninsula in every nook and hook and cranny and on every continental headland, every island inlet, and in every peaceful arm of the Danish seas strewn with the wrecks of the migrant column, battered by the hardships of a long, unbroken march. Only the strong survived. The weak and unenterprising, as the head of the resistless column bent toward the northern sea, shrank from the toils and terrors of a march in a northern clime. Upon these geographical points of "refuge" the racial weaklings had been gathering for years. Nothing stayed the mighty Goth. The Norman could turn the sharpest corners in the Danish world. Once planted in the footsteps of a pioneer, even a phlegmatic Teuton might pursue his way. But the exhausted weakling dropped in his tracks, and crawled to the shelter of some inviting angulus or nook. Here they were—the drift in the eddy of an archipelagic sea. Jutes from Jutland (in Denmark); Saxons from the shores to the south; Angles, from the Anglen in Sleswick—in all a seething colluvian of ethnic stragglers swarming for an ultimate raid upon British soil. The great Teutonic nation was seemingly planted on the best lands of Central Europe; the great Scandinavian people lay far to the north; the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, lay between;—the Angli, who gave their name to England, lying at the point (Angulus) where the coast of the Baltic first bends sharply toward the north. Are these the peoples that gave substance and strength and splendor to the English race? The men who fall out in a forced march (said a great Virginian captain) are not the men to stand up in a long fight.
Toward the close of the Eighth Century the Scandinavians of the North began their work of devastation upon English soil. For at least three centuries the Anglo-Saxons held the Rover's name in dread. Contemporary English abounds with Scandinavian words and forms; numerous traces of Scandinavian occupancy are found on English soil to-day. The men of the Heptarchy were in the main bred upon English soil. At least they were not a broken race of stragglers when they came. They were a vigorous, fighting breed. But if Bismarck were looking for "mixed races" in his carefully calculated career of annexation (no "dreaming" here), he certainly found what he sought at the point where the column of Goths that had marched from Central Asia, turning its head to the German Ocean, took courage from the bracing prospect and—gathering their veterans into one compact, invulnerable mass—debouched boldly toward the vast, inhospitable regions of the North. The Angles and Saxons were cradled among the mixed or mongrel peoples that had been dropped by the great migrant races in the southeastern corner of the northern sea—a population, says Marsh, of "very mixed and diversified blood." These furnished the original "comelings" upon British soil, but it is scarcely credible that the outcome of this mongrel stock was the Anglo-Saxon Race,—which in the great Triple Alliance of Norman and Saxon and Dane has for centuries maintained an unbroken front and kept the world in awe.
