Germany and the Germans | Page 3

Titles now so largely ornamental were then
descriptive of duties and responsibilities.
In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of these two
frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the Northern March, or
March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of the Slays, and was
situated in the midst of forests and marshes just beyond the Elbe. This
March of Brandenburg was won from the Slays in the first instance by
the Saxons and Franks of the Saxon plain. When the burgrave,
Frederick of Hohenzollern, came to take possession of his new territory
he was received with the jesting remark: "Were it to rain burgraves for
a whole year, we should not allow them to grow in the march." But
Frederick’s soldiers and money, and his Nuremberg jewels, as his
cannon were called, ended by gaining complete control, a control in
more powerful hands to-day than ever before.
The second, called the Eastern or Austrian March, was situated in the
basin of the Danube. These two great states were formed in lands that
had ceased to be German and had become Slav or Finnish territory. The
fighting appetite of the German tribes, and the spirit of chivalry later,
which had drawn men in other days in France to the East, in Spain
against the Moors, in Normandy against England, were offered an
opportunity and an outlet in Germany, by forays and fighting against
the Finns and Slays.
Out of the conquest and settlement of these territories grew, what we

know to-day, as the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. Out of
their margraves, who were at first sentinel officers guarding the outer
boundaries of the empire, and mere nominees of the Emperor, have
developed the Emperor of Germany and the Emperor of Austria, the
one ruling over the most powerful nation, the other the head of the most
exclusive court, in Europe.
When a man becomes a power in the world, these days, our first
impulse is to ask about his ancestry. Who were his father and his
mother; what and who were his grandfathers and grandmothers, and
who were their forebears. Where did they come from, what was the
climate; did they live by the sea, or in the mountains, or in the plains.
We are at once hot on the trail of his success. Be he an American, we
wish to know whether his people came from Holland, from France,
from England, or from Belgium; where did they settle, in New England,
in New York, or in the South. We no longer accept ability as a miracle,
but investigate it as an evolution. If the man be great enough, cities vie
with each other to claim him as their child; he acquires an Homeric
versatility in cradles.
Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the
predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our
excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his
twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.
It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded in
the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that brings
us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about the
Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with
the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these people.
In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one morning to
find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed strangers coming
down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more light-hearted
warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered mountain-sides on
their shields. They had been crowded out of what is now Switzerland,
and called themselves, though they were much alike in appearance, the
Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against

them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the
north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had
no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor
write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant." Very little is
to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny
which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the middle of the
century before Christ that Caesar advanced to the frontier of what may
be called Germany. He met and conquered there these men of the blood
who were to conquer Rome, and to carry on the name under the title of
the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar met the ancestors of those who were
to be Caesars, and with an eye on Roman politics, wrote the
"Commentaries," which were really autobiographical messages, with
the Germans as a text and an