ears of all schoolboys--Aricvistus and Vercingetorix. When Vercingetorix
was overthrown at Alesia, Gaul became definitely Roman. For five hundred
years it remained loyal to Rome. Within its borders, was established the
Pax Romana, and in 250 A.D., under St. Denis, Christianity. When the
disintegration of the empire set in five centuries afterward, Gaul was
among the first provinces to suffer. With the coming of the Visigoths and
Huns from the Black Sea, the Pranks and Bnrgundians from beyond the Rhine,
the Roman fall was near, but great battles were first fought in Gaul,
battles which rivaled those of Caesar five centuries before. Greatest of
all these was the one with Attila, at Chalons, in 451, where thousands
perished.

When the Roman dominion ended, Rome's one great province in Gaul became
seventeen small principalities, and power drifted fast into the hands of a
warlike aristocracy. Then a strong man rose in Clovis, who, in 508, made
Lutetia his capital, his successors enriching and adorning it. From these
beginnings, has been evolved, in twelve hundred years, the great modern
state--through Charlemagne and his empire-building, Louis XI. and his work
of consolidating feudal principalities into one strong state, through a
Hundred Years' War, fierce wars of religion, a long line of Bourbon kings,
with their chateaux-building in Touraine and Versailles, the Revolution of
1789, the Napoleonic era, the Republic. An historical land surely is this,
and a beautiful land, with her snow-capped mountains of the southeast, her
broad vineyards, unrivaled cathedrals, her Roman remains, ancient olive
groves, her art, her literature, her people.

Belgium and Holland were included in the territory known to Rome as Gaul.
Here dwelt a people called the Belgii, and another called the Nervii--that
tribal nation whom Caesar "overcame" on a summer's day, and the same
evening, "in his tent," "put on" the mantle that was pierced afterward by