business enterprise was more concerned with the character and credit of those with whom it carried on transactions than with their theological opinions; hence a decline in religious intolerance and the rise of the spirit of practical accommodation.
Historians have long been at swords' points in trying to explain England's early transition from a feudal and clerical civilization to a civilian and bourgeois culture. The Nordic school of scholars delights in ascribing this development to the peculiar genius of Teutonic peoples for freedom and self-government. Its most eloquent advocate, John Richard Green, who united racial pride with evangelical enthusiasm, saw in local meetings of rude tribesmen held in the forests of northern Germany—a moot more ignorant than an assembly of Russian mujiks—the origin of the English Parliament, the source of popular liberty. He looked upon it, he exclaimed, as upon the headwaters of a mighty river.
Though once widely accepted, the interpretation of the Teutonic school has been sharply challenged in recent times, French scholars, not to our surprise, advancing to throw down the gage. Leaders among these doubters seek to demonstrate with great learning that the bulk of the English people are not Teutonic at all, but Celtic—conquered first by the Romans, then by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally by the Normans. English institutions, they tell us, are not Germanic, but a peculiar mixture of primitive Celtic, ancient Roman, barbaric Nordic, and Gallo-Norman cultures. If the Teutons had a genius for developing parliamentary government, trial by jury, liberty of speech and press, a free peasantry, and a triumphant bourgeoisie, why, such critics ask, was Germany, the original home of the Teutons, one of the last nations of western Europe to exhibit these elements of civilization? The question is unanswered and the battle royal over the true key to English social development goes on.
The sober judgment of those given to research rather
