Thus, at one time losing themselves in the overwhelming flood of their invaders, like the waters of a lake inundated by the sea; at another, retreating westerly before the oncoming torrent, the Celtic nations have gradually almost disappeared from continental Europe, and alone find a miserable home and wretched abiding-place on the most eastern shores of the Atlantic, and the most western corners of the Old World.
If the Atlantic could have afforded them a footing upon its turbulent waters, they would long since have been driven into it by their rapacious invaders. The complaint of the unhappy Celts has, ever since they were hunted to the extreme west of Europe, been the same, “Our enemies drive us into the sea; and the sea drives us back upon our enemies.”
Saxon ingenuity has, however, at last endeavoured to circumvent the sea. If it cannot receive _into_ its bosom the last wreck of the Celts, it can carry them _upon_ it to lands still further west, there to pine, and dwindle away and die; out of sight, and therefore out of the mind, of the haughty invader, who turns with well-feigned horror and disgust from the ruin and degradation which he has wrought.
To make room for himself, he expatriates the ancient owners of the soil, not only without remorse or compunction, but with much self-laudation and pharisaical pride that he has not extirpated them, and has not—only because he could not—adopted the ingenious idea of temporarily sinking an island to purify it for his own undisputed use and enjoyment.[44]
Naturally, however, the Celtic is not a low-class race. It may not have been originally so highly organized, or so mentally gifted as the Gothic; but in its infancy it had virtues which long thraldom has exterminated.
It is no fiction that Cæsar found the Gaulish and British youth more apt than the Goths at acquiring the arts and language of Rome, and that, in a few years, Roman civilization, more efficient than Saxon, had converted Britain into one of the most fertile and well-ordered provinces of the empire. It is no fiction that Rome found in Britain one of the most determined opposers of its claim to universal dominion, and that if it were to be
“Asked, why from Britain Cæsar did retreat? Cæsar himself might whisper—he was beat.”[45]