The Crest-Wave of Evolution | Page 7

its manvantaric period; the
Race Soul had lost control of the forces that bound its organism
together; centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse
that marks the cycles of youth and growth. It had eaten into individual
character; whence the tendency to fly off at tangents. We see the same
thing in any decadent people; by which I mean, any people at the end of
one of its manvantaras, and on the verge of a pralaya. And remember
that a pralaya, like a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two
lives, is simply a means for restoring strength and youth.
How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what settled and
civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather from two not much
noticed facts. First: Caesar, conqueror of the Roman world and of
Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day, landed twice in Britain,
and spent a few weeks there without accomplishing anything in
particular. But it was the central seat and last stronghold of the Celts;
and his greatest triumph was accorded him for this feat; and he was
prouder of it than anything else he ever did. He set it above his
victories over Pompey. Second: the Gauls, in the first century B.C.,
were able to put in the field against him three million men: not so far
short of the number France has been able to put in the field in the recent
war. Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have raised such an army--in
France. Caesar is said to have killed some five million Gauls before he

conquered them. By ordinary computations, that would argue a
population of some thirty millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of
Diviciacos a century after the latter's death; and even if that
computation is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there was a
very large population; and a large population means always a long and
settled civilization.
Diviciacos ruled only Gaul and Britain; possible Ireland as well; he
may have been a Gaul, a Briton, or an Irishman; very likely there was
not much difference in those days. It will be said I am leaving out of
account much that recent scholarship has divulged; I certainly am
leaving out of account a great many of the theories of recent
scholarship, which for the most part make confusion worse confounded.
But we know that the lands held by the Celts--let us boldly say, with
many of the most learned, the Celtic empire--was vastly larger in its
prime than the British Isles and France. Its eastern outpost was Galatia
in Asia Minor. You may have read in The Outlook some months ago an
article by a learned Serbian, in which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of
the Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of the
fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an original Celtic
population. Bohemia was once the land of the Celtic Boii; and we may
take it as an axiom, that no conquest, no racial incursion, ever succeeds
in wiping out the conquered people; unless there is such wide disparity,
racial and cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers
in America and the Indians. There are forces in human nature itself
which make this absolute. The conquerors may quite silence the
conquered; may treat them with infinite cruelty; may blot out all their
records and destroy the memory of their race; but the blood of the
conquered will go on flowing through all the generation of the children
of the conquerors, and even, it seems probable, tend ever more and
more to be the prevalent element.
The Celts, then, at one time or another, have held the following lands:
Britain and Ireland, of course; Gaul and Spain; Switzerland and Italy
north of the Po; Germany, except perhaps some parts of Prussia;
Denmark probably, which as you know was called the Cimbric
Chersonese; the Austrian empire, with the Balkan Peninsula north of

Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace, and much of southern Russia and the
lands bordering the Black Sea. Further back, it seems probable that
they and the Italic people were one race; whose name survives in that
of the province of Liguria, and in the Welsh name for England, which
is Lloegr. So that in the reign of Diviciacos their empire had already
shrunk to the meerest fragment of its former self. It had broken and
shrunk before we get the first historical glimpses of them; before they
sacked Delphi in 279 B.C.: before their ambassadors made a treaty with
Alexander; and replied to his question as to what they feared: "Nothing
except that the skies should fall." Before they sacked Rome in 390. All
these historic eruptions were the mere sporadic outburst of a race