offices of friendship after the separation of the island province from
her empire.

Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that
out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of
separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates. Britain, according to St.
Jerome, was "a province fertile in tyrants." The Roman municipal
government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing
power. It fell to pieces here, as in Gaul, when that power was
withdrawn. It resolved itself into a number of local governments without
any principle of cohesion. The vicar of the municipium became an
independent ruler and head of a little republic; and that his authority
was contested by some who had partaken of his delegated dignity may be
reasonably inferred.

The difference of races would also promote the contests for command. If
East Anglia contained a preponderance of one race of settlers, and Kent
and Sussex of another, they might well quarrel for supremacy. But when
all the settlers on the Saxon shore had lost the control and protection
of the Count who once governed them, it may also be imagined that the
more exclusively British districts would not readily coöperate for
defence with those who were more strange to their kindred even than the
Roman. All the European Continent was in a state of political
dislocation; and we may safely conclude that when the great power was
shattered that had so long held the government of the world, the more
distant and subordinate branch of its empire would resolve itself into
some of the separate elements of authority and of imperfect obedience by
which a clan is distinguished from a nation.

Nor was the power of the Christian Church in Britain of a more united