darker those same ages must have become without the intervention of the
Teutons, present criticism begins to protest against the term. All that
was lost with the ancient world was something of intellectual keenness,
something of artistic culture, quickly regained when man was once more
ripe for them. What the Teutons had to offer of infinitely greater
worth, what they had developed in their cold, northern forests, was
their sense of liberty and equality, their love of honesty, their
respect for womankind. It is not too much to say that, without these,
any higher progress was, and always will be, impossible.

In short, the Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit.
The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race,
for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared the way.

Who were these Teutons? Rome knew them only vaguely as wild tribes
dwelling in the gloom of the great forest wilderness. In reality they
were but the vanguard of vast races of human beings who through ages had
been slowly populating all Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Beyond the
Teutons were other Aryans, the Slavs. Beyond these were vague non-Aryan
races like the Huns, content to direct their careers of slaughter
against one another, and only occasionally and for a moment flaring with
red-fire beacons of ruin along the edge of the Aryan world.

Some at least of the Teutonic tribes had grown partly civilized. The
Germans along the Rhine, and the Goths along the Danube, had been from
the time of Augustus in more or less close contact with Rome. Germanicus
had once subdued almost the whole of Germany; later emperors had held
temporarily the broad province of Dacia, beyond the Danube. The
barbarians were eagerly enlisted in the Roman army. During the closing
centuries of decadence they became its main support; they rose to high