Germany and the Germans | Page 6

of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best
worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it
with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world.
Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended from
Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from "those barbarians who issued from
the woods of Germany."
Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a disease
contracted from contact with the Oriental, the Syrian, the Jew, the
Greek, the riffraff of the eastern and southern shores of the
Mediterranean; who, by the way, make up the bulk of the immigration
into America at this time. Rome was an incurable invalid long before
the Germans took control of the western world and saved it.
When the Roman Emperor Augustus died, in 14 A. D., to be succeeded
by Tiberius, the Roman Empire was bounded on the north and east by

the Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and
Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean
in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far north
as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about 500 A. D.,
the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the Roman Empire.
The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of England; the
Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to the Elbe;
south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the country to the
north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube, were in the hands
of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed to the eastern
end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at Constantinople.
In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of these
German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by the
Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with
the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and
Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the
West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what
is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne’s grandfather. What is
now western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom
of the German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic,
and into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory:
after victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila,
who had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and
Treves, and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after
driving off the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing
their rule upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in
Constantinople, where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453,
which date may well be taken as marking the beginning of modern
history, and became themselves thereafter one of the first powers in
Christian Europe; a power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of
the Western powers.
These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first translation
of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the days when
Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the feeling for

beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the days when
cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the
man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his
translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born;
and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features
of the historical landscape.
These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare,
into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of
men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are
now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and
Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way
from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the
Rhine, the Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again,
landing on the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and
bringing home tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This
virile stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished;
and in Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for
translating the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into
painting, building, poetry, and music.
France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew
out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory
roughly included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder,