great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
of the old Spanish _conquistadores_ in America. Scott's charming romance
of "Ivanhoe" must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English
society in the time of Richard I.

And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?

This, paradoxical as it may seem: That the Norman conquest was the making
of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first
_conquistadores_ in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out,
rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their
names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the
peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and
the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more as
centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races--master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the