en such peoples as were overtaken
in this region by the Germanic barbarian invasions, and were reduced to
subjection and presently merged with their alien masters, the same
general fashion of law and order that presently grew out of that
barbarian conquest has continued to govern the life of those peoples,
with relatively slight and intermittent relaxation of its rigors.
Contrasted with its beginnings, in the shameful atrocities of the Dark
Ages and the prehistoric phases of this German occupation, the later
stages of this system of coercive law and order in the Fatherland will
appear humane, not to say genial; but as compared with the degree of
mitigation which the like order of things presently underwent elsewhere
in western Europe, it has throughout the historical period preserved a
remarkable degree of that character of arrogance and servility which it
owes to its barbarian and predatory beginnings.

* * * * *

The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are
sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers
them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the
vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all
historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars. Yet there
are certain outstanding features in the case, in history and prehistory,
that are too large or too notorious to be set aside or to be covered
over, and these may suffice to show the run of circumstances which have
surrounded the German peoples and shaped their civil and political
institutions, and whose discipline has guided German habits of thought
and preserved the German spirit of loyalty in the shape in which it
underlies the dynastic State of the present day.

Among the most engaging of those fables that make the conventional
background of German history is the academic legend of a free
agricultural village community made up of ungraded and masterless men.
It is not necessary here to claim that such a village community never
played a part in the remoter prehistoric experiences out of which the
German people, or their ruling classes, came into the territory of the
Fatherland; such a claim might divert the argument. But it is
sufficiently patent to students of those matters today that no such
community of free and ungraded men had any part in the Germanic
beginnings; that is to say, in the early experiences of the Fatherland
under