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 long past its prime and