n later years for the old Roman province
in this respect, will be explained in its own place; it is probable
that the want of time alone prevented him from extending
the same system to the regions which he had recently subdued.

The Catastrophe of the Celtic Nation
Traits Common to the Celts and Irish

All was over with the Celtic nation. Its political dissolution
had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun
and in course of regular progress. This was no accidental destruction,
such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable
of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically
necessary catastrophe. The very course of the last war proves this,
whether we view it as a whole or in detail. When the establishment
of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts--
mostly, moreover, German or half-German--offered energetic
resistance. When the foreign rule was actually established,
the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether
without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work
of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately
and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an
Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus. The sieges
and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth
of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic
struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character. Every page of Celtic
history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had
the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts
boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage
before its presence. In the mighty vortex of the world's history,
which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard
and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain
itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same
fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer
down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate
of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically
superior nationality. On the eve of parting from this remarkable
nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact,
that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire
and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits
which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the