e Teutonic peoples. Had there even been anything like a
primaeval equality among our race, a hereditary aristocracy could never
have arisen, or if arising for a while, never could have remained as a
fact which all believed in, from the lowest to the highest. Just, or
unjust, the institution represented, I verily believe, an ethnological
fact. The golden-haired hero said to his brown-haired bondsman, 'I am a
gentleman, who have a "gens," a stamm, a pedigree, and know from whom I
am sprung. I am a Garding, an Amalung, a Scylding, an Osing, or what
not. I am a son of the gods. The blood of the Asas is in my veins. Do
you not see it? Am I not wiser, stronger, more virtuous, more beautiful
than you? You must obey me, and be my man, and follow me to the death.
Then, if you prove a worthy thane, I will give you horse, weapons,
bracelets, lands; and marry you, it may be, to my daughter or my niece.
And if not, you must remain a son of the earth, grubbing in the dust of
which you were made.' And the bondsman believed him; and became his
lord's man, and followed him to the death; and was thereby not degraded,
but raised out of selfish savagery and brute independence into loyalty,
usefulness, and self-respect. As a fact, that is the method by which the
thing was done: done;--very ill indeed, as most human things are done;
but a method inevitable--and possibly right; till (as in England now) the
lower classes became ethnologically identical with the upper, and
equality became possible in law, simply because it existed in fact.

But the part of Dr. Latham's 'Germania' to which I am bound to call most
attention, because I have not followed it, is that interesting part of
the Prolegomena, in which he combats the generally received theory, that,
between the time of Tacitus and that of Charlemagne, vast masses of
Germans had migrated southward from between the Elbe and the Vistula; and
that they had been replaced by the Sclavonians who certainly were there
in Charlemagne's days.

Dr. Latham argues against this theory with a great variety of facts and
reasons. But has he not overstated his case on some points?

Need the migrations necessary for this theory have been of 'unparalleled
magnitude and rapidity'?

As for the 'unparalleled completeness' on which he lays much stress, from
the fact that no remnants of Teutonic population are found in the
countries evacuated:

Is it the fact that 'history only tells us of German ar