Goths, save Romans; none among the Vandals, save Romans. Blush,
Roman people, everywhere, blush for your morals. There is hardly a
city free from dens of sin, and none at all from impurity, save those
which the barbarians have begun to occupy. And do we wonder if we
are surpassed in power, by an enemy who surpasses us in decency? It
is not the natural strength of their bodies which makes them conquer
us. We have been conquered only by the vices of our own morals.'

Yes. Salvian was right. Those last words were no mere outburst of
national vanity, content to confess every sin, save that of being
cowards. He was right. It was not the mere muscle of the Teuton
which enabled him to crush the decrepit and debauched slave-nations,
Gaul and Briton, Iberian and African, as the ox crushes the frogs of
the marsh. The 'sera juvenum Venus, ideoque inexhausta pubertas,'
had given him more than his lofty stature, and his mighty limbs. Had
he had nought but them, he might have remained to the end a blind
Samson, grinding among the slaves in Caesar's mill, butchered to make
a Roman holiday. But it had given him more, that purity of his; it
had given him, as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady
brain, and a free and loyal heart; the energy which springs from
health; the self-respect which comes from self-restraint; and the
spirit which shrinks from neither God nor man, and feels it light to
die for wife and child, for people, and for Queen.



PREFACE TO LECTURE III.--ON DR. LATHAM'S 'GERMANIA.'