The Evolution of States Part 21

[Footnote 444: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, pp. 19-20.]

[Footnote 445: _Id._ p. 22.]

[Footnote 446: Compare Lord Cromer's mention (p. 32) of the doubt as to whether the Himalayas made a secure frontier.]

[Footnote 447: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, p. 14.]

[Footnote 448: _Id._ pp. 43, 65-68.]

[Footnote 449: _Id._ p. 62.]

[Footnote 450: _Id._ p. 22.]

[Footnote 451: _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_, p. 26, citing Mommsen.]

[Footnote 452: _Id._ p. 118.]

[Footnote 453: _Id._ p. 126.]

[Footnote 454: Mr. Balfour, using this egregious expression in his lecture on Decadence (p. 35), explains that "the 'East' is a term most loosely used. It does not here include China and j.a.pan, and _does_ include parts of Africa." At the same time it does not refer to the ancient Jews and Phoenicians. One is moved to ask, Does it include the Turks and the Persians? If not, in view of all the other exceptions, might it not be well to drop the "unchanging" altogether?]

PART IV

THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS

NOTE ON LITERATURE

No quite satisfactory history of Italy has appeared in English. The standard modern Italian history, that of Cesare Cantu, has been translated into French; but in English there has been no general history of any length since Procter and Spalding. Col. Procter's _History of Italy_ (published as by G. Perceval, 1825; 2nd ed.

1844) has merit, but is not abreast of modern studies. Spalding's _Italy and the Italian Islands_ (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1845) is an excellent work of its kind, covering Italian history from the earliest times, but is also in need of revision. The comprehensive work of Dr. T. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_ (2nd ed. 1892-99, 8 vols.) comes down to the death of Charlemagne.

Of special histories there are several. One of the best and latest is that of _The Lombard Communes_, by Prof. W.F. Butler (1906).

Captain H.E. Napier, in the preface to his _Florentine History_ (1846, 6 vols.) rightly contended that "no people can be known by riding post through their country against time"; but his six learned volumes are ill-written and ill-a.s.similated. The best complete history of Florence, the typical Italian Republic, is the long _Histoire de Florence_ by F.T. Perrens (9 tom. 1877-84; Eng.

tr. of one vol. by Hannah Lynch, 1892). T.A. Trollope's _History of the Commonwealth of Florence_ (1865, 4 vols.) is less indigestible than Napier's, but is gratuitously diffuse, and is written in large part in unfortunate imitation of the pseudo-dramatic manner of Carlyle. It is further blemished by an absurd index. Neither this nor Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt's _History of the Venetian Republic_ (1860, 4 vols.; new ed. in two large vols. 1900) has much sociological value, though the latter is copious and painstaking, albeit also diffuse. The _Genoa_ of J. Theodore Bent (1881) is an interesting sketch; but the well-read author fails in orderly construction.

A good short manual is the _Italy_ of Mr. Hunt (Macmillan's Historical Course); and an excellent compendium is supplied by the two treatises of Oscar Browning (1894-95), _Guelphs and Ghibellines_ (covering the period 1250-1409) and _The Age of the Condottieri_, covering the Renaissance, to 1530. Bryce and Hallam are alike helpful to general views; and it is still profitable to return to the condensed _History of the Italian Republics_ by Sismondi (written for the English "Cabinet Cyclopaedia" in 1832), though it needs revision in detail. In his two volumes ent.i.tled _The Fall of the Roman Empire_ (1834) that author has given a useful conspectus of the period covered by Gibbon's great work.

Sismondi's larger and earlier _Histoire des republiques italiennes_ has never ceased to be well worth study, though the _Geschichte von Italien_ of H. Leo (1829) improves upon it in several respects. It has been revised and condensed (Routledge, 1 large vol. 1906) by Mr. William Boulting. For the early period the most comprehensive survey is the _Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter_ of Ludo Moritz Hartmann (3 Bde. in 5, 1897-1911) which comes down to the tenth century.

Among modern monographs that of Alfred von Reumont on _Lorenzo de'

Medici_ (Eng. tr. 1876, 2 vols.) in nearly every way supersedes the old work of Roscoe, whose _Leo X_, again, is practically superseded by later works on the Renaissance, in particular those of Burckhardt (Eng. tr. of Geiger's ed. in 1 vol. 1892) and the late J.A. Symonds. Miss Duffy has a good chapter on Florentine trade and finance in her _Story of the Tuscan Republics_, 1892; and the short work of F.T. Perrens, _La civilisation florentine du 13e au 16e siecle_ (1892--in the _Bibliotheque d'histoire ill.u.s.tree_) is luminous throughout; but Ranke's _History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations_ (Eng. tr. 1887), which deals with the Italy of 1494-1514, is little more than a sand-heap of incident. On the economic side there is a good research in Pignotti's essay on Tuscan Commerce in his _History of Tuscany_ (Eng. tr. 1823, vol. iii). Much interesting detail is given, with much needless rhetoric, in _The Guilds of Florence_, by Edgc.u.mbe Staley, 1906.

Of great general value is the elaborate work of Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter_ (4te Aufl. 8 Bde.

1886-96; Eng. tr. by Mrs. Hamilton, 8 vols. 1895-1902), which, however, suffers from the disparity of its purposes, combining as it does, a topographical history of the city of Rome with a full history of its politics. It remains a valuable ma.s.s of materials rather than a history proper. The same criticism applies to the very meritorious _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_ of A. von Reumont (3 Bde. 1867-70), which begins with the very origin of the city, and comes down to our own time.

But there has risen in contemporary Italy a school of historical students who are rewriting the history of the great period in the light of the voluminous archives which have been preserved by munic.i.p.alities. One outcome of this line of investigation is Prof.

Villari's _The Two First Centuries of Florentine History_ (Eng. tr.

of first 2 vols. 1894). New light, further, has been thrown on the commercial history of Italy in the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages by the admirable research of Prof. W. von Heyd, of which the French translation by Furcy Raynaud, _Histoire du commerce du Levant an moyen age_ (1886, 2 tom.) is recast and considerably enlarged by the author, while the Renascence period is illuminated by R. Pohlmann's treatise, _Die Wirthschafts Politik der Florentiner Renaissance und das Princip der Verkehrsfreiheit_ (Leipzig, 1878).

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS

-- 1

To understand aright the phenomenon of medieval Italian civilisation we need first to realise that it was at bottom a fresh growth on the culture roots of the cities of Romanised Italy. When the imperial centre was s.h.i.+fted to the East, as already remarked, the people of Italy began a fresh adaptation to their conditions; those of Rome, instead of leading, standing most zealously to the old way of things. All the barbarian irruptions did but hara.s.s and hinder the new development; they finally counted for little in its upward course. There is a prevalent hallucination, akin to others concerning the "Teutonic race," in the shape of a belief that Italy was somehow "regenerated" by the "free nations of the North." No accepted formula could well be further away from the facts. If the political qualities of the "Teutonic race,"

whatever that may mean, are to be generalised on the facts of the invasions of Italy by the Germanic tribes, from Theodoric to Frederick Barbarossa, they must be summed up as consisting in a general incapacity for progressive civilisation. The invaders were, in fact, too disparate in their stage of evolution from that of the southern civilisation to be capable of a.s.similating it and carrying it on. Living a life of strife and plunder like the early Romans, they found in the disarmed Italians, and in their rapidly degenerate predecessors of their own stock, an easier prey than the Romans had ever known till they went to the East; but in the qualities either of military or of civil organisation they were conspicuously inferior to the Romans of the early Republic. Men of the highest executive ability appeared from time to time among their leaders; a circ.u.mstance of great interest and importance, as suggesting that a percentage of genius occurs in all stages of human culture; but the ma.s.s of the invaders was always signally devoid of the very characteristics so romantically attributed to them by German, English, and even French Teutophiles--to wit, the gifts of union, discipline, order, and self-government. These elements of civilisation depend on the functioning of the nerve centres, and are not to be evolved by mere multiplication of animated flesh, which was the main constructive process carried on in ancient Germania. Precisely because they were, as Tacitus noted, the most h.o.m.ogeneous of the European races of that era,[455] they were incapable of any rapid and durable social development. It is only mixed races that can evolve or sustain a complex civilisation.

"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our era, were barbarians (_i.e._, men between savagery and civilisation) in the most rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture; devoid of the useful arts, save those normally practised by savages; given to drunkenness; chronically at war; and alternating at other times between utter sloth and energetic hunting--the pursuit which best fitted them for war. Because the peoples thus situated were in comparison with the Romans "chaste" and monogamous--a common enough virtue in savage life[456]--they are supposed by their admirers to have been excellent material for a work of racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense does this hold good. As a new "cross" to the Italian stocks they may indeed have made for beneficial variation; but by themselves they were mere raw material, morally and psychologically. Their reputed virtue of chast.i.ty disappeared as soon as the barbarians pa.s.sed from a northern to a southern climate,[457] their vices so speedily exceeding the measure of paganism that even a degree of physiological degeneration soon set in. Even in their own land, met by a fiercer barbarism than their own, they collapsed miserably before the Huns. As regards the arts and sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to trace to the invaders any share in the progress of Italy,[458] save in so far as they were doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To their own stock, which had been relatively too h.o.m.ogeneous, the gain of crossing was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told a bragging emba.s.sy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor those of peace;[459] and so long as the Empire in any section had resources enough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to destroy any combination of the Teutons. There was always generals.h.i.+p enough for that, down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius the Second routed their swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or Caesar; Stilicho annihilated Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius, after routing Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast host of Attila's Huns; and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of Belisarius, scantily weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign, could drive back from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of Wittich.[460]

As against the "Teutonic" theory of Italian regeneration, a hearing may reasonably be claimed for the "Etruscan," thus set forth:--"The Etruscans were undoubtedly one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity--the great civilisers of Italy--and their influence not only extended over the whole of the ancient world but has affected every subsequent age.... That portion of the Peninsula where civilisation earliest flourished, whence infant Rome drew her first lessons, has in subsequent ages maintained its pre-eminence.... It was Etruria which produced Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Luca Signorelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, Hildebrand, 'the starry Galileo,' and such a n.o.ble band of painters, sculptors and architects as no other country of modern Europe can boast.

Certainly no other region of Italy has produced such a galaxy of brilliant intellects.... Much may be owing to the natural superiority of the race, which, in spite of the revolutions of ages, remains essentially the same, and preserves a distinctive character." (G. Dennis, _The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, 3rd ed. 1883, Introd. vol. i, pp. cii-iv.) a.s.sumption for a.s.sumption, this is as defensible as the others.

What happened in Italy after Odoaker was that, for sheer lack of unitary government on the part of the invaders, the cities, which preserved the seeds and norms of the old civilisation, gradually grew into new organic life. Under the early Empire they had been disarmed and unwalled, to make them incapable of revolt. Aurelian, stemming the barbarian tide, began to wall them afresh; but, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the seat of empire left Italy economically incapable of action on an imperial scale; and the personal imbecility of such emperors as Honorius filled up the cup of the humiliation of what once was Rome. But the invaders on the whole did little better; and the material they brought was more hopeless than what they found. The pa.s.sage from full barbarism to order and civilisation cannot conceivably be made in one generation or one age. Athaulf, the able successor of Alaric, pa.s.sed his competent judgment on the matter in words which outweigh all the rhetoric of modern romanticism: "He was wont to say that his warmest wish had at first been to obliterate the Roman name, and to make one sole Gothic empire, so that all that which had been Romania should be called Gothia, and that he, Athaulf, should play the same part as did Caesar Augustus.

But when by much experience he was convinced that the Goths were incapable of obedience to laws, because of their unbridled barbarism, and that the State without laws would cease to be a State, he had chosen to seek glory in rebuilding its integrity and increasing the Roman power by Gothic forces, so that posterity should at least regard him as the restorer of the empire which he was unable to replace. Therefore he strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461]

It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government--if indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before--to develop in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged against the Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of Byzantium to the physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed the moment we compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told by Gregory of Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a typical product of decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian Chilperic, "the Nero of France," or of his father, less ill-famed, Clothaire, the slayer of children, the polygamist, the strictly orthodox Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will remunerate us for all the good we do" to his priests.[462] Odious women were as powerful in Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of Brunehild is not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury, parricide, fratricide, filicide, a.s.sa.s.sination, ma.s.sacre, debauchery, are if possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told by the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation of Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the heads.

One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue," _apropos_ of the character of Totila, has given one of his editors (Bohn ed. iv, 505) the opportunity to a.s.sert that the "natural superiority" of the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the moral equals of Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited, iv, 181) on the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the same historical s.p.a.ce, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head Sismondi declares (_Histoire des Francais_, ed. 1821, i, 403-4; _Fall of the Roman Empire_, i, 263) that "there was not a Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (_History of the Germanic Empire_, 1834, i, 10) improves on this to the extent of a.s.serting that "those abominable princes generally--such were their premature vices--died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise that, Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, p. 43), his stock was specially liable to degeneration through indulgence. But Motley, whose Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times reaches nearly the lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingian _race_ had been exhausted by _producing a race_ of heroes." Any formula avails to support the dogma that "the German was loyal as the Celt was dissolute" (_id._ p. 6).

It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself. Sismondi (_Fall_, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran,"

as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed pa.s.sed for good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to be a.s.sa.s.sinated; and of his b.a.s.t.a.r.d brother, Gondebald, who was slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and ma.s.sacred all the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi's _Hist. des Francais_, i, 173.

A great name, such as Theodoric's, tends to dazzle the eye that looks on the history of the time; but the great name, on scrutiny, is seen to stand for all the progress made in a generation. Theodoric, though he would never learn to read,[463] had a civilised education as regards the arts of government, and what was masterly in his rule may at least as well be attributed to that as to his barbaric stock.[464] It is important to note that in his reign, by reason of being forced to live on her own products, Italy actually attains the capacity to export grain after feeding herself[465]--a result to which the king's rule may conceivably have contributed.[466] In any case, the able ruler represents but a moment of order in an epic of anarchy.[467] After Theodoric, four kings in turn are a.s.sa.s.sinated, each by his successor; and the new monarchy begins to go the way of the old. What Belisarius began Na.r.s.es finished, turning to his ends the hatreds between the Teutonic tribes. Na.r.s.es gone, a fresh wave of barbarism flowed in under Alboin the Longobard, who in due course was a.s.sa.s.sinated by his outraged wife; and his successor was a.s.sa.s.sinated in turn. Yet again, the new barbarism began to wear all the features of disorderly decay; and the Longobard kingdom subsisted for over two hundred years, under twenty-one kings, without decisively conquering Venetia, or the Romagna, or Rome, or the Greek munic.i.p.alities of the south.[468] Then came the Frankish conquest, completed under Charlemagne, on the invitation of the Pope, given because the Franks were good Athanasians and the Longobards Arians. The great emperor did what a great man could to civilise his barbarian empire; but instead of fitting it to subsist without him he destroyed what self-governing power it had.[469] Soon after his death, accordingly, the stone rolled downhill once more; and when Otto of Saxony entered Rome in 951, Italy had undergone five hundred years of Teutonic domination without owing to Teuton activity, save indirectly, one step in civil progress.

It thus appears that, while barbaric imperialism has different aspects from that of "civilisation," having a possible alterative virtue where the conditions are in themselves stagnant, even then its work is at best negative, and never truly constructive. Charlemagne's work, being one of personal ambition, was in large part destructive even where it ostensibly made for civilisation; and at his death the Germanic world was as literally degenerate, in the sense of being enfeebled for self-defence, as was the Roman world in the period of its imperial decay.[470] It is true that, despite the political chaos which followed on the disintegration of his system, there is henceforth no such apparent continuity of decadence as had followed on the Merovingian conquest,[471] and his period shows a new intellectual activity.[472]

But it is a fallacy to suppose that he created this activity, which is traceable to many sources. At most, Charlemagne furthered general civilisation by forcing new culture contacts in Central Europe[473], and bringing capable men from other countries, notably Alcuin, but also many from Ireland.[474] But these favourable conditions were not permanent; there was no steady evolution; and we are left asking whether progress might not have occurred in a higher degree had the emperor's work been left unattempted.[475] In any case, it is long after his time that civilisation is seen to make a steady recovery; and there is probably justice in the verdict of Sismondi, that Otto, an administrator of no less capacity than Charlemagne, did more for it than he.[476] Guizot, while refusing to admit that the work of Charlemagne pa.s.sed away, admits Sismondi's proposition that in the tenth century civilised society in Europe was dissolving in all directions.[477] The subsequent new life came not of imperialism but of the loosening of empire, and not from the Teuton world but from the Latin. It is from the new munic.i.p.al developments inferribly set up before and under Otto[478] that the fresh growth derives.

Mommsen, in one of those primitively bia.s.sed anti-Celtic pa.s.sages which bar his pretensions to rank as a philosophic historian, declares of the elusive Celtae of antiquity, in dogged disregard of the question (so often put by German scholars and so often answered against him[479]) whether they were not Germans, that, "always occupied with combats and heroic actions, they were scattered far and wide, from Ireland to Spain and Asia Minor; but all their enterprises melted like snow in spring; they created nowhere a great State, and developed no specific civilisation."[480] The pa.s.sage would be exactly as true if written of the Teutons. Every tendency and quality which Mommsen in this context[481] specifies as Celtic is strictly applicable to the race supposed to be so different from the Celts. "Attachment to the natal soil, so characteristic of the Italians and _Germans_, was foreign to them.... Their political const.i.tution was imperfect; not only was their national unity feebly recognised,[482] as happens with all nations at their outset, but the separate communities were lacking in unity of aim, in solid control, in serious political sentiment, and in persistence.

The sole organisation of which they were capable was the military,[483]

in which the ties of discipline dispensed the individual from personal efforts." "They preferred the pastoral life to agriculture." "Always we find them ready to roam, or, in other words, to begin the march ...

following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage"; and so on. Such were in strict truth the peculiarities of the Germani, from Tacitus to the Middle Ages; while, on the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that not merely the Gauls but the Britons of Caesar's day were much better agriculturists than the Germani.[484]

In the early stage the Germani actually s.h.i.+fted their ground every year;[485] and for every migration or crusade recorded of Celtae, three are recorded of Teutons. The successive swarms who conquered Italy showed an almost invincible repugnance to the practice of agriculture; in the ma.s.s they knew no law and no ideal save the military; they were constantly at tribal war with each other, Frank with Longobard and Goth with Burgundian; Ostrogoths and Gepidae fought on the side of Attila at Chalons against Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons; they had no idea of racial unity; and not one of their kingdoms ever went well for two successive generations. The story of the Merovingians is one nightmare of ferocious discord; that of the Suevi in Spain, and of the Visigoths in Aquitaine, is mainly a memory of fratricide. As regards organisation, the only Teutonic kings who ever made any headway were those who, like Theodoric, had a civilised education, or, like the great Charles and Louis the Second, eagerly learned all that Roman tradition could teach them. The main stock were so incapable of political combination that, after the deposition of the last incapable Carlovingian (888), they could not arrest their anarchy even to resist the Huns and Saracens. Their later conquests of Italy came to nothing; and in the end, by the admission of Teutonic men of science,[486] there is nothing to show, in all the southern lands they once conquered, that they had ever been there. The supposed type has disappeared; the language never imposed itself; the Vandal kingdom in Africa went down like a house of cards before Belisarius;[487] the Teutondom of Spain was swept away by the Moors, and it was finally the mixed population that there effected the reconquest. No race had ever a fairer opportunity than the Visigoths in Spain, with a rich land and an undivided monarchy.

"Yet after three centuries of undisputed enjoyment, their rule was overthrown at once and for ever by a handful of marauders from Africa.

The Goth ... had been weighed in the balance and found wanting."[488] In Spain, France, and Italy alike, the language remained Romance; "not a word is to be found in the local nomenclature of Castile, nor yet of the Asturias, to tell the tale of the Visigoth";[489] even in England, where also the Teutonic peoples for six hundred years failed to attain either progressive civilisation or political order, the Norman conquerors, speaking a Romance language, vitally modified by it the vocabulary of the conquered. So flagrant are the facts that Savigny and Eichhorn in their day both gave the opinion that "the German nations have had to run through their history with an ingrained tendency in their character towards political dismemberment and social inequality." The contrary theory was a later development.[490]

If, instead of seeking simply for the scientific truth, we sought to meet Teutomania with Celtomania, we might argue that it was only where there was a Celtic basis that civilisation prospered in the tracks of the Roman Empire.[491] Mommsen, in the pa.s.sage first above cited, declares that the Celts, meaning the Cisalpine Galli, "loved to a.s.semble in towns and villages, which consequently grew and gained in importance among the Celts sooner than in the rest of Italy"--this just after alleging that they preferred pastoral life to agriculture, and just before saying that they were always on the march. If the first statement be true, it would seem to follow that the Celts laid the groundwork of medieval Italian civilisation; for it was in the towns of what had been Cisalpine Gaul that that civilisation flourished. Parts of Northern Italy had in fact been comparatively unaffected by the process which rooted out the peasantry in the South; and there was agriculture and population in the valley of the Po when they had vanished from large areas around and south of Rome.[492] It is certain that "Celtic"

Gaul--whence Charlemagne (semi-civilised by the old environment) wrought hard, but almost in vain, to impose civilisation on Germany--reached unity and civilisation in the Middle Ages, while Germany remained divided and semi-barbaric; that Ireland preserved cla.s.sical learning and gave it back to the rest of Europe when it had well-nigh disappeared thence;[493] that England was civilised only after the Norman Conquest; and that Germany, utterly disrupted by the Reformation where France regained unity, was so thrown back in development by her desperate intestine strifes that only in the eighteenth century did she begin to produce a modern literature. One of the most flagrant of modern fables is that which credits to "Teutonic genius" the great order of church architecture which arose in medieval and later France.[494] "That sublime manifestation of 'poetry in stone' so strangely called Gothic architecture is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for four hundred years after the destruction of the Goths."[495] The Goth was not a builder but a wrecker.

But if anything has been proved by the foregoing a.n.a.lyses, it is that race theories are, for the most part, survivals of barbaric pseudo-science; that culture stage and not race (save as regards the need for mixture), conditions and not hereditary character, are the clues to the development of all nations, "race" being a calculable factor only where many thousands of years of given environments have made a conspicuous similarity of type, setting up a disadvantageous h.o.m.ogeneity. It was simply their prior and fuller contact with Greece and Rome, and further their greater mixture of stocks, that civilised the Galli so much earlier than the Germani. On the other hand, the national failure in Spain and Italy of the Teutonic stocks, as such, proves only that idle northern barbarians, imposing themselves as a warrior caste on an industrious southern population, were (1) not good material for industrial development, and (2) were probably at a physiological disadvantage in the new climate. Southerners would doubtless have failed similarly in Scandinavia.

I know of no thorough investigation of the amalgamation of the stocks, or the absorption or disappearance of the northern. There is some reason to suppose that early in Rome's career of conquest there began in the capital a subst.i.tution of more southerly physiological types--eastern and Spanish--for those of the early Latins. But the Italians at all times seem to have undergone a climatic selection which adapted them to Italy, where the northerners, whether Celt or Teuton, were not so adapted. The supposed divergence of character between northern and southern Italians, insisted on by the former in our own time, certainly cannot be explained by any Teutonic intermixture; for the Teutons were settled in all parts of Italy, and nowhere does the traditional blond type remain. Exactly such differences, it should be remembered, are locally alleged as between Norwegians and Danes, northern and southern Germans, and northern and southern English.