HALFORD J. MACKINDER, Two, at least, of the great waves of conquest, which have left their mark on the people and the in stitutions of Britain, had spent their force be fore any historian arose to record them, and are thus for us like the forgotten events of our unconscious childhood. As to these we can only speak darkly and doubtfully according to the scanty evidence furnished by excavations of the barrows in which the bones of Prehis toric Man are laid. Judging from these, we are able to say that in the dawn of the history of Britain, our island was inhabited by a race ignorant of the use of metals, of the manufac ture of pottery, and of the art of weaving, but accustomed to the use of stone implements such as wedges, axes and hammers, which they fash ioned with considerable skill. This race is one of those called Neolithic, to distinguish them from • the incalculably older races of Palmo lithic Man, who also used stone implements, but who lived before that mighty parenthesis in human history which is called the Great Ice Age. What the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain may have called themselves we are utterly un able to say. For convenience they are gener ally spoken of as Iberian, in order to indicate a possible connection with the aboriginal in habitants of Spain, now represented by the Basques ; but this connection is only an ethno logical guess and must not be taken as an es tablished fact. The race in question buried their dead in long barrows, the excavation of which shows that they were of short stature, with skulls tending to the long rather than the broad shape (Dolicho-cephalic rather than Brachy-cephalic) and that they were probably black-haired and of dark complexion.
To these aborigines of Britain entered two tall and fair-haired races, both of them prob ably belonging to that great family of nations which we call Celtic. The first of these in vading races wielded weapons of bronze k the second was acquainted with the use of iron, and this may account for their victory over their predecessors. At present the tendency of scholars is to identify the bronze-using people with the Gaels (or as they are now generally termed the Goidels), who have left their chief mark on the populations of the Scottish High lands, of Ireland, and of Gaul. The wielders of iron would be the race (now called Bry thonic) which gave its name to Britain; which occupied the greater part of the southern half of the island when Caesar landed; which sur vives under the name of Cymri in the moun tains and valleys of Wales; and whose lan guage, once spoken in Cornwall and Cumber land, is the dearest possession of the eloquent Welsh and has a large currency among the peasants of Brittany. As to the date of these several movements accurate information en tirely fails us, but it is probable that several centuries elapsed between the arrival of the two waves, the Goidelic and the Brythonic, and that all had been accomplished several generations before the birth of Christ.
It was in the year 55 B.c. that the Roman eagles were first seen on this side of the straits of Dover. Whether Julius Caesar seriously con templated the conquest of Britain, or whether his two expeditions in that and the following year were only theatrical performances meant to overawe the tribesmen of Gaul and to dazzle the populace of Rome, is a question not easily answered. It is certain that, if an abiding con quest was his aim, he had greatly underrated the difficulty of the tasks His own narrative, much more candid than that of most generals who indite their own bulletins, shows clearly that neither expedition was really successful, that the Britons fought well, that the dense forests of their land, and the chopping tides of their seas powerfully aided their resistance, and that Caesar himself, after the midsummer of 54 B.C.. never desired any closer view of the white cliffs of Britain.
But though Caesar was foiled, Rome re mained and was still the world-conquering city. In the year 43 A.D. when Claudius was Emperor of Rome, an expedition was fitted out for the conquest of Britain. The commander was the high-born senator Aulus Plautius, and he had under his orders four legions with a propor tionate number of cavalry and wallies." The latter were for the most part armed more lightly than the legionaries and were generally sta tioned in the wings, while the legionaries fought in the centre. The total number of Plautius' soldiers cannot have been less, and may have been considerably more, than 40,000. For 17 years no serious misadventure hindered the on ward progress of the Roman arms, though the Silures of South Wales, under their king, Cara tacus, kept the invaders at bay for many years. In the year 59, however, we find the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus crossing the Menai straits and conquering Anglesey, and the Roman soldiers quartered at Chester and at Lincoln. Then came (60) a terrible reverse of fortune, the only serious set-back to the Roman career of conquest in these early centuries. Maddened by the tyranny of a grasping Roman official, Boadicea, queen of the Iceni (a tribe inhabiting what is now the county of Nor folk), called her countrymen to arms, sacked the Roman colony of Camulodunum (Colches ter) and the cities of Verulamium and Londi nium, and threatened to root the Romans out of the land. Suetonius, however, hastened back into the centre of the island and there, giving battle to the far more numerous forces of the barbarians, achieved a decisive victory.