Sunday, October 04, 2020
Our Anglo-Saxon Forefathers
S.A. Dunham, A History of Europe During the Middle Ages, Vol. III (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1834), p. 81:
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To state the liberal qualities, the manly wisdom, the public virtue, of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, has been a favourite employment for declamation in a certain noisy assembly. Such declamation shows a deplorable ignorance of their character, their history, their institutions. They were neither liberal nor just; they were neither wise nor virtuous. On the contrary, every remaining record proves that they were at once the most barbarous, the most selfish, the most bloodthirsty, unjust, odious, and yet despicable, of the European nations; that they were destitute of all virtue, public or private. How such a horde of lawless savages contrived to escape mutual destruction by the violence or perfidy of each other, is a problem of impracticable solution.
