A Short History of France | Page 3

months, while they made themselves at home amid
uncomprehended luxuries.
Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them
back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there--master of

Rome; that the iron-clad legions had been no match for his naked force,
and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul. It
was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more fragments drew
closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common danger
to meet, a common foe to drive back.
Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food
and land; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the
Gallic name. National pride was born.
For years they hovered like wolves about Rome. But skill and superior
intelligence tell in the centuries. It took long--and cost no end of blood
and treasure; but two hundred years from the capture of Rome, the
Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set by
nature herself against barbarian encroachments.
Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps
of the Western Kelts. There had been long before an overflow of a tribe
in Northern Gaul (the Kymrians), which had hewed and plundered its
way south and eastward; until at the time of Alexander (B.C. 340) it
was knocking at the gates of Macedonia.
Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with
fresh insolence, demanding "land," and during the centuries which
followed, the Gallic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece.
Half-naked, gross, ferocious, and ignorant, sometimes allies, but
always a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (B.C. 278), and
turned their attention to Asia Minor. And there, at last, we find them
settled in a province called Gallicia, where they lived without
amalgamating with the people about them, and four hundred years after
Christ were speaking the language of their tribal home in what is now
Belgium. And these were the Galatians--the "foolish Galatians," to
whom Paul addressed his epistle; and we have followed up this Gallic
thread simply because it mingles with the larger strand of ancient and
sacred history with which we are all so familiar.
It is not strange that Roman courage became a byword. The fibre of
Rome was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she

was struggling with Gaul and with the memories of the Carthaginian
wars still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her gates--their blows
directed with a solidity superior to that of the barbarians who had
preceded them. Where the Gauls had knocked, the Goths thundered.
Again the city was invaded by barbarian feet, and again did superior
training and intelligence drive back the invading torrent and triumph
over native brute force.
Such, in brief outline, was the condition of the centuries just before the
Christian era.
It is easy now to read the meaning of these agitated centuries, and to
recognize the preparation for the passing of the old and the coming of
the new.
CHAPTER II.
The making of a nation is not unlike bread or cake making. One
element is used as the basis, to which are added other component parts,
of varying qualities, and the result we call England, or Germany, or
France. The steps by which it is accomplished, the blending and fusing
of the elements, require centuries, and the process makes what we
call--history.
It was written in the book of fate that Gaul should become a great
nation; but not until fused and interpenetrated with two other
nationalities. She must first be humanized and civilized by the Roman,
and then energized and made free from the Roman by the Teuton.
The instrument chosen for the former was Julius Caesar, and for the
latter--five centuries later--Clovis, the Frankish leader.
It is safe to affirm that no man has ever so changed the course of human
events as did Julius Caesar. Napoleon, who strove to imitate him 1800
years later, was a charlatan in comparison; a mere scene-shifter on a
great theatrical stage. Few traces of his work remain upon humanity
to-day.

Caesar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to
flow into Western Europe, and the sodden mass of barbarism was
infused with a life-compelling current. This was not accomplished by
placing before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but
by a mingling of the blood of the nations--a transfusion into Gallic
veins of the germs of a higher living and thinking--thus making them
heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity.
Was any human event ever fraught with such consequences to the
human race as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar?
The Gallic wars had for centuries drained the treasure and taxed