OCR Rendition - approximate

Relations between Civilized and Savage Life. 321 hear little of any considerable immigrations or invasions from the eastward, from Germany or Scandinavia. The Roman language had evidently been from the first the language of officialism and of the educated classes. How far it had superseded the mother tongue of the aborigines in daily and domestic use it is difficult now to guess, owing to the numerous successive waves of large immigrations of northern races after the Romans left. The same may be said of the physical stock. Cornwall is evidently not the only English province which may claim a large amount of aboriginal element in its population. But to what extent the population of other provinces has undergone changes and additions similar to those known to have occurred in Cornwall during the period of recent history, it would be difficult accurately to estimate. It is, however, clear, that before the Romans left, so many of the aborigines had been civilized and educated as Romans, that men and women of British birth and Roman education were sufficiently numerous to be a recognisable element among the upper classes in Rome. Space does not admit of more than a glance at the interaction of civilized on uncivilized races during the long period which elapsed between the time when the tide of Roman conquest began to recede, and the recommencement of a career of Eastern conquest by the Western nations about the time of the crusades. Western Europe had in the interim been overwhelmed by invading barbarians from the north and east. Occupying one province after another of the Roman Empire, immigrant conquerors became themselves gradually more or less settled, civilized, and Romanised, changed in religion and often in language, till they took the form of the modern nationalities of Europe, nearly as we see them at present. The process seems in most cases to have been very uniform. Sometimes as successful invaders and conquerors, sometimes as allies or hired auxiliaries of the Christian ruler, the heathen uncivilized immigrants acquired the substantial power of the sword in a Roman province, learned many of the arts, adopted much of the civilization, and finally the religion of the conquered people, intermarried with, and settled amongst them without losing the uncivilized energy they had brought with them from the distant regions of the north-east. After a century or two they were a new people, with settled habits and national aspirations, wedded to the land of their adoption, determined to defend it and its institutions to the death, and as firmly rooted in the soil as if for the preceding centuries they had lived on it, and not been ceaselessly journeying westward from the original cradle of their race.