.

Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the
predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our
excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his
twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.

It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded
in the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that
brings us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about
the Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with
the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these
people. In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one
morning to find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed
strangers coming down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more
light-hearted warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered
mountain-sides on their shields. They had been crowded out of what is
now Switzerland, and called themselves, though they were much alike in
appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman
armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on
their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now
France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they
could neither read nor write: "Literarum secreta viri pariter ac
feminae ignorant." Very little is to be found concerning them in the
Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost.
It was toward the middle of the century before Christ that Caesar
advanced to the frontier of what may be called Germany. He met and
conquered there these men of the blood who were to conquer Rome, and
to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar
met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on
Roman politics, wrote the "Commentaries," which were really
autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and an excuse.

Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar,
and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist
historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he
rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not
treated by the Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed of
Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch,
or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a
Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to t