Germany and the Germans | Page 4

of Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, "as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime "to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of children and destroying the rest."
The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic civilization. "No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people, they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound of their arms," continues our author.
The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon, lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: "The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners."
Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion; Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should be admitted to citizenship, "Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious words that have come from this man’s mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a senator, as a consul?" Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors; and their descendants rule the world.
It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck; in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes, or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a Lee.
Beyond the certified beyond, we see dimly through the mists of history, hosts of men marching, ever marching from the east, spreading some toward Norway and Sweden, some skirting the Baltic Sea to the south; driving their cattle before them, and learning the arts of peace and war, and self-government, from the harsh school-masters of pressing needs and tyrannical circumstances, the only teachers that confer degrees of permanent value. They become fishermen and small landholders in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. "Jeudi," or Jupiter’s day, becomes their god Thor’s day, or Thursday; "Mardi," or Mars’s day, is their Tiu’s day, or Tuesday; "Mercredi," or Mercury’s day, is Odin’s or Woden’s day, or Wednesday.
These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe.
It is worth noting that the Rhine and the Danube have their sources near together, and form a line of water from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a significant line in Europe from the beginning down to this day. This line of water divides not only lands but nations, manners, customs, and even speech, and what we call the North, and what we call the South, may be said to be, with negligible exceptions, what is north and what is south of those two rivers. It is and always has been the Mason and Dixon’s line of Europe.
All of these peoples mould their institutions, from the habits and customs forced upon them by their surroundings. The members of the tribe of the Suevi, now Swabians, were not allowed to hold fixed landed possessions, but were forced to exchange with each other from time to time, so that no one should become wedded to the soil and grow rich thereby. Readers of history will remember, that Lycurgus attempted similar legislation among the Spartans, hoping thus to keep them simple and hardy, and fit for war.
How many hundreds of years, these various tribes were working out their rude political and domestic laws, no man knows. The imaginative historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes who lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small areas of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal