it is the Aryan family which has come to the front.
Assimilating, developing, and giving vastly wider scope to the highest
forms of thought and religion originated by other families, notably
the Semitic, the various Aryan nationalities form, and have formed
for ages, the vanguard of civilization. These nationalities are now
practically co-extensive with Christendom; and on them has been laid
by Divine Providence "the white man's burden"--the task of raising the
rest of mankind along with themselves to an ever higher level--social,
material, intellectual, and spiritual.

A. 2.--Aryan history is thus, for all practical purposes, the history
of mankind. And a mere glance at Aryan history shows how entirely
its great central feature is the period during which all the
leading forces of Aryanism were grouped and fused together under
the world-wide Empire of Rome. In that Empire all the streams of our
Ancient History find their end, and from that Empire all those of
Modern History take their beginning. "All roads," says the proverb,
"lead to Rome;" and this is emphatically true of the lines of
historical research; for as we tread them we are conscious at every
step of the _Romani Nominis umbra_, the all-pervading influence of
"the mighty name of Rome."

A. 3.--And above all is this true of the history of Western Europe
in general and of our own island in particular. For Britain, History
(meaning thereby the more or less trustworthy record of political and
social development) does not even begin till its destinies were drawn
within the sphere of Roman influence. It is with Julius Caesar, that
great writer (and yet greater maker) of History, that, for us, this
record commences.

A. 4.--But before dealing with "Britain's tale" as connected with
"Caesar's fate," it will be well to note briefly what earlier
information ancient documents and remains can afford us with regard
to our island and its inhabitants. With the earliest dwellers upon its
soil of whom traces remain we are, indeed, scarcely concerned. For in
the far-off days of the "River-bed" men (five thousand or five hundred
thousand years ago, according as we accept the physicist's or the
geologist's estimate of the age of our planet) Britain was not yet an
island. Neither the Channel nor the North Sea as yet cut it off from
the Continent when those primaeval savages herded beside the banks of
its streams, along with elephant and hippopotamus, bison and elk, bear
and h