cruel and terrible as it was, should replace it. Roman laws, language,
literature, faith, manners, were all swept away. A few mosaics, coins,
and ruined fragments of walls and roads are all the record that remains
of 300 years of occupation.

And the Briton himself--what became of him? In Ireland and Scotland he
lingers still; but, except in Wales and Cornwall, England knows him no
more. Like the American Indian, he was swept into the remote,
inaccessible corners of his own land. It seemed cruel, but it had to
be. Would we build strong and high, it must not be upon _sand_. We
distrust the Kelt as a foundation for nations as we do sand for our
temples. France was never cohesive until a mixture of Teuton had
toughened it. Genius makes a splendid spire, but a poor corner-stone.
It would seem that the Keltic race, brilliant and richly endowed, was
still unsuited to the world in its higher stages of development. In
Britain, Gaul, and Spain they were displaced and absorbed by the
Germanic races. And now for long centuries no Keltic people of
importance has maintained its independence; the Gaelic of the Scotch
Highlands and of Ireland, the native dialect of the Welsh and of
Brittany, being the scanty remains of that great family of related
tongues which once occupied more territory than German, Latin, and
Greek combined. The solution of the Irish question may lie in the fact
that the Irish are fighting against the inevitable; that they belong to
a race which is on its way to extinction, and which is intended to
survive only as a brilliant thread, wrought into the texture of more
commonplace but more enduring peoples.

It was written in the book of fate that a great nation should arise
upon that green island by the North Sea. A foundation of Roman cement,
made by a mingling of Keltic-Briton, and a corrupt, decayed