and liberties away, so under a series of native kings those laws and liberties might have died out, as they died out in so many continental lands.  But the despotism of the crown called forth the national spirit in a conscious and antagonistic shape; it called forth that spirit in men of both races alike, and made Normans and English one people.  The old institutions lived on, to be clothed with a fresh life, to be modified as changed circumstances might make needful.  The despotism of the Norman kings, the peculiar character of that despotism, enabled the great revolution of the thirteenth century to take the forms, which it took, at once conservative and progressive.  So it was when, more than four centuries after William’s day, England again saw a despotism carried on under the forms of law.  Henry the Eighth reigned as William had reigned; he did not reign like his brother despots on the continent; the forms of law and freedom lived on.  In the seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth, the forms stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply the means for another revolution, again at once conservative and progressive.  It has been remarked a thousand times that, while other nations have been driven to destroy and to rebuild the political fabric, in England we have never had to destroy and to rebuild, but have found it enough to repair, to enlarge, and to improve.  This characteristic of English history is mainly owing to the events of the eleventh century, and owing above all to the personal agency of William.  As far as mortal man can guide the course of things when he is gone, the course of our national history since William’s day has been the result of William’s character and of William’s acts.  Well may we restore to him the surname that men gave him in his own day.  He may worthily take his place as William the Great alongside of Alexander, Constantine, and Charles.  They may have wrought in some sort a greater work, because they had a wider stage to work it on.  But no man ever wrought a greater and more abiding work on the stage that fortune gave him than he

“Qui dux Normannis, qui Caesar praefuit Anglis.”

Stranger and conqueror, his deeds won him a right to a place on the roll of English statesmen, and no man that came after him has won a right to a higher place.

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