Germany and the Germans | Page 4

excuse.
Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar,
and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian
and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the
manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not treated by the
Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed 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