Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/143

and political condition of this branch of the Saxon race, while it was pagan, was not very inferior to, although very different from, that of the Anglo-Saxon branch which had been Christianised five hundred years before, and had among them the learning and organisation of the church of Rome. They had a literature of their own; a language common to all, and in which that literature was composed; laws, institutions, political arrangements, in which public opinion was powerful; and had the elements of freedom and constitutional government. What may have been the comparative diffusion of the useful arts in the two branches in those ages? The test of the civilisation of a people, next to their intellectual and civil condition, is the state of the useful arts among them.