COMMUNITIES of men, like individuals, are modified by their surroundings. Racial types and national types are probably the results of the accumulated and inherited changes produced by the whole of the conditions to which the ancestors of the race or nation have been subjected. The type once initiated reacts upon its surroundings, and becomes itself a factor limiting and directing future changes. Endless migrations, wars, conquests, and colonisations have intermingled the racial stocks and branches of the long-civilised peoples of the world in countless ways and degrees, till almost every portion of a modern nation's territory is occupied by a complex and diversified population. Such a population would be diversely affected by even similar conditions; but the conditions are hardly anywhere similar over any moderate extent of habitable territory. Climate, geographical position, the nature of the surface, the natural products, food supplies, and other conditions may vary greatly; and each variation tends to differentiate more and more each portion of the population from a general uniformity. In this differentiation some communities will attain a finer character, a greater activity or efficiency, in a word, a higher civilisation than the average; they will become, as it were, nuclei in the general tissue of the nation. Such nuclei will reveal themselves by a better development and a greater efficiency, by, in short, a larger par

ticipation in all that is highest in the national life. At these places the national activity, industrial, social and political, will be greatest; and here, too, will arise the national incentives to progress and reform of all kinds. The districts occupied by these nuclei will be those which have been and are historically, industrially, commercially, and politically most important.

All this is applicable to the British Isles; or, better still, considering the limits of our space, to England. Ethnology and history combine to tell us that the population is racially complex. Though extreme variations of physical surroundings are rare or wanting, there are countless variations of sufficient degrees to produce con siderable diversity in the population, while a long and high civilisation has brought it into touch with an infinite variety of social and political surroundings. Moreover there is a fairly full and accurate history extending over a long period to supply us with materials for the verification or otherwise of our conclusions. Let us pass it in survey,--broadly and cursorily as our limits will alone permit.

The little that we know of Celtic Britain relates to the south. The inhabitants of the Kentish district had some trade with the continent before the arrival of the Romans. They shipped tin for Gaul, from the island of Thanet it is supposed, some centuries before the Roman invasion. This tin came from Cornwall and

Devonshire, and was brought either in boats or on horseback to Thanet. Recent investigations make it doubtful whether, until after the Roman invasion, there was ever any direct trade in tin between the south-west of Britain and the Continent; though there was probably intercourse of some kind between the inhabitants of this part of Britain and those of the nearest part of Gaul. Cæsar says

that iron was found on the sea-coast of Britain; and Professor Boyd Dawkins believes that iron-mining was carried on in the wealds of Kent and Sussex before Cæsar came. Gold coins of a Gallo-Grecian pattern were coined in the south of Britain, according to Mr. John Evans, probably as early as a century and a half before the Christian Era; and the first coining probably took place in Kent. Other southern tribes afterwards coined money; but though money appears to have circulated as far as Cornwall, there is no satisfactory proof that any tribe occupying ground west of what is now Dorsetshire had a coinage of its own. At a later period these coins circulated further north; but in the first century we have the statement of a Spanish writer that the further a British tribe was from the Continent, the less it knew of any other wealth than flocks and land. And probably this is a fair measure of the relative degrees of civilisation in the different parts of Britain.

The south of Britain naturally came earliest under Roman rule, and received most of the Roman influence and civilisation. Though the principal Roman cities were largely military stations and placed at those points from which the country could be best held in subjection, they nevertheless lie mostly in the south. Of the greatest only three, York, Chester, and Lincoln, lie north of a hori

zontal line drawn from the vicinity of the Wash; while many more, London, St. Albans, Colchester, Bath, Richborough, Gloucester, and others lie south of it. The chief streets cross each other rather to the south and east of the centre of the country; and, even more significant, the breadth of the roads varied from eight to twenty-four feet in the north, and sometimes extended to sixty feet in the great highways of the south. There were great pottery manufactories on the banks of the Medway; the principal iron districts were the forest of Dean and the wealds of Kent and Sussex; while London was the chief trading - city. The one great political rising of the British against the Roman rule occurred in the south-east, the rebellion of the Trinobantes at Colchester, London, and St. Albans. The invaders succeeded to some extent in Romanising the Britons in the south-east; but elsewhere their influence was that of a military occupation only. In conclusion we may safely say that, from the Celtic or the Roman point of view, the south-east of Britain was at this time the most important part of the country.

The Saxon invasions came generally from the east; and though the conquest and colonisation of the southeast and south took place first, those of the midlands and the north were not far behind. The first effect of the invasions was to break up the Roman unity into a number of tribal kingdoms, each fighting for its own existence and solely occupied with its own affairs. In a disorganised state of society the only effective superiority is a military, gradually merging into a political one. It would be futile to enter into the confused record of early Saxon tribal warfare; we must seek rather for the indications of nation - building. One of

the earliest signs of the growth of political power is the establishment of a small overlordship in the south east by Ethelbert of Kent. To him Pope Gregory sent his Christian mission, and in his territory and under his patronage Romish Christianity was introduced into England, and Canterbury received its its first archbishop. Upon the death of Ethelbert, his power was transferred to Redwald of East Anglia. Meanwhile Northumbria, under Edwin, was rising into a great overlordship embracing the greater part of Saxon England. Irish Christianity was being introduced into the north; yet Edwin bowed to a mission from Kent, and forty years later the southern Christianity triumphed over the northern at the Synod of Whitby. The Northumbrian overlordship and supremacy were succeeded by a Mercian supremacy, and this again by the still greater supremacy of Wessex, which now represented the south and south-east of England. The Danish invasion threatened the West-Saxon supremacy for a time, and it is worth noting that there was even a moment when Wessex alone represented the English cause; but it turned the tide of foreign invasion and steadily expanded until it embraced the whole of England and enabled its king to become the undisputed ruler of the whole people, Saxons, Celts, and Danes. Thus, in military and political power the final and highest supremacy in Saxon England was West-Saxon. In material prosperity Wessex was equally advanced; its literature was the most copious and the wealthiest in the kingdom, and its dialect is still considered the classic type of Old English, though modern English grew out of the Mercian.

The Norman invasion seized upon the

south and took over the West-Saxon supremacy as it stood. The Conqueror found the extreme west and north more difficult to subdue; and in his fury at a revolt of the north in 1068, he laid it completely waste. By the famine which followed this act of savagery one hundred thousand persons are said to have lost their lives, and as the entire population of England at the time was probably no more than two millions, the northern counties must have been severely crippled by this by this fearful harrying. For half a century they lay bare, and a much longer period must have elapsed before they can be said to have recovered from the injury. This must have helped the south, the midlands, and the west to take a great advance, comparatively, towards the attainment of a higher civilisation. From the Domesday Survey we can gain a much better idea of the general state of the country at this time than is possible at any previous one. The bulk of the population was in the southern and eastern counties. Fortyone provincial cities or boroughs are named, most of which are the county towns of to-day; while there are ten fortified towns of greater importance, Canterbury, York, Nottingham, Oxford, Hereford, Leicester, Lincoln, Stafford, Chester, and Colchester, almost all, it will be noticed, in the midlands. The south, the midlands, and the north seem to represent three stages in the work of subjugation. The south, the territory which had been mainly West-Saxon, became a sort of demesne to the Conqueror, and was held without much difficulty. The midlands were more disaffected, and were held in check by fortified towns. The north, too turbulent to be ruled, was destroyed. A few towns had a population of over five thousand inhabitants; they are