But the Nordic strain prevailed, as that of the conquerors,
even where the Nordic folk did not outnumber all the rest, as they
certainly did in Great Britain. The Franks, whose name meant "free
men", at last settled down with the Gauls, who outnumbered them; so
that the modern French are a blend of both. But the Gauls were the
best warriors of all the Celts: it took Caesar eight years to conquer
them. So we know that Frenchmen got their soldier blood from both
sides. We also know that they learnt a good deal of their civilization
from the Romans and passed it on to the empire-building Normans, who
brought more Nordic blood into France. The Normans in their turn
passed it on to the Anglo-Saxons, who, with the Jutes and Danes, form
the bulk, as the Normans form the backbone, of most English-speaking
folk within the British Empire. The Normans are thus the great bond of
union between the British Empire and the French. They are the
Franco-British kinsfolk of the sea.
We must not let the fact that Prussia borders on the North Sea and the
Baltic mislead us into mistaking the Prussians for the purest offspring
of the Nordic race.
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