they found nobody there, beyond a few wandering tribes of savages Their chief difficulty must have been to hew down the forests, their contests were with trees rather than with men. The Germans on the other hand found the ground occupied. They could only extend their border not by simple settlement but by conquest, at the expense either of the Kelts to the south and west of them, or of the Slavonians to the east. Of the Southern extension we know few particulars; they overran and occupied the territories of Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden, which had been originally occupied by Kelts, and from these new possessions they pressed southward into Switzerland and the Tyrol; although even as late as B.C. 15, when Tiberius and Drusus the stepsons of Augustus carried on war in the Tyrol, the tribes which opposed them were decidedly of Keltic and not of German race. Westward across the Rhine the fertile land of Gaul invited the German invaders. But here their incursions were stopped, and the history of the world was altered by the genius of one man. That man was Julius Cæsar When Cæsar came as a Roman general into Gaul in the year B.C. 58, the flood of German invasion was on the point of breaking over Gaul. The Suevi or Suabian Germans under their chief, Ariovistus, whose Latinized name perhaps represents the German Heerefürst, "the prince of the army," had crossed the Rhine and were already encamped on Gallic soil; they were a vast host who came to settle and had brought their wives and families with them, and Cæsar marched to attack them. We read that the Roman legions were so daunted by what they had heard of the lofty stature and warlike prowess of the Germans that they expected nothing but defeat, and the camp was full of men making their wills. But Cæsar harangued them, exhorted them to renewed courage, and threatened, if they hung back, to charge the enemy with his favourite Tenth Legion alone. In the battle which ensued the Germans, after a sharp struggle, were completely defeated, and as happened in ancient wars, destroyed; thousands were cut down without mercy on the field, men, women, and children, and the remainder sold as slaves except those fugitives who succeeded in making their way back across the Rhine. Humanly speaking it

was owing, and solely owing, to Cæsar's campaigns that the population of France was not Germanized (as that of England was to be), but continues in the main Keltic to the present day. For when at a later date the Franks who where Germans conquered France, and gave it their name, they came there rather to rule over the original inhabitants than to supplant them, much as the Normans did in England, and like the Normans were gradually absorbed by the people. whom they had conquered. Of course though Cæsar's campaigns saved the Keltic race, they did not save the Keltic language, but the difference was that instead of any dialect of German being spoken, the Gauls adopted a debased form of the provincial Latin spoken by their Roman conquerors, and the original Keltic tongue maintained its ground only in the extreme corner of the continent, as the Breton of Brittany. Of course it will be understood that when we speak of the Keltic race remaining in France, we mean France as it is now, that is without Alsace, for Alsace has long been German; it was only annexed to France in the reign of Louis XIV. and the actual boundary line between the Keltic and German races, is not at the Rhine, but at the Vosges mountains.

North of the French political boundary, however, there remains another fragment of the Keltic race, I mean the Walloons. You will not find them on an ordinary map, but they inhabit the Walloon provinces of Eastern Belgium. The condition of the kingdom of Belgium is peculiar. The official language is French, but French is not the language of the people anywhere. The western provinces which are flat and fertile are inhabited by the Flemings who speak Flemish, and who resemble their neighbours the Dutch in race, appearance, manners, and language; in every thing in fact except in religion, and political feeling. And if the Dutch are ultra Protestant, while the Flemings are amongst the most zealous Roman Catholics in Europe, this difference is to be attributed historically to the military prowess of the Duke of Alva who kept them apart in the sixteenth century; just as the fact that while the Dutch are prosperous, Ghent and Bruges and Ypres are decayed towns is in great part to be attributed to the Duke of Alva's blunders as a statesman and economist. But the eastern

provinces of Belgium contain a very different race. In that hilly tract of barren country, a miniature Wales, of which Liège is the centre, a Keltic race, the Walloons, have managed to maintain themselves. They speak, however, not a Keltic tongue, but a Latinized dialect, like the French, it is in fact an oldfashioned or obsolete French, and in some respects more vigorous than the French of Paris. For instance, the Walloon says septante, octante, nonante for seventy, eighty, ninety, while the Frenchman resorts to the clumsy periphrases soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt-dix. In the history of the Thirty Years War we frequently read of Walloon Regiments which are spoken of by the Germans with a peculiar horror. It was these poor Keltic mountaineers who served for pay and plunder in the German armies, something in the same way as the Connaught rangers serve in the English army. I do not suppose that the Walloons were more fond of plunder than the other troops of that period who had irregular pay and hardly any commissariat; but what gave the Germans such a horror of them was that they were strangers of a foreign race who spoke what was to the Germans an unintelligible gibberish.

We must turn, however, to another instance in which the Germans enlarged their border at the expense of the Kelts, I mean this island of Britain. According to tradition the three German tribes which invaded Britain were Jutes from Jutland, Angles from Holstein, and Saxons from the mouth of the Weser. Although the Jutes came from Jutland I do not think there can have been any Scandinavians among them; rather it is probable that the pressure of Danish Scandinavians from the north was one of the reasons which induced them to emigrate. But if we may judge by the test of language there must have been Dutchmen from Holland, and Frisians from Friesland among the invaders. Indeed the Frisian is at this day the continental dialect which most resembles English, so that the Frieslanders themselves have a proverb that "Butter, Brei en Kis is gut Engls en gut Fris." In fact one would suppose that the invaders must have started from all points along the coast of the North sea from the mouth of the Scheldt, to the mouth of the Elbe. But one most interesting ques

tion is, what became of the invaded? The idea that the conquered Britons in any considerable numbers retired to Wales, is, I think simply impossible. Now a days it is easy enough for us to take a railway ticket to Dolgelley, but how was a Briton from Kent, or from what was so soon to become Essex, to find his way to the distant and unknown Welsh mountains, where certainly also his presence would not be required, for Wales then, as now, cannot have provided more than enough food for its inhabitants. A very few zealous Christians, if there were any such, may have fled before the worshippers of Woden and Thor, but the mass of the population can have had no such escape. On this subject I think we may safely lay down two propositions: The first is that no population. which has once occupied a country is ever entirely extirpated. Observe we lay a stress on population, and occupied. Scattered tribes of savages may entirely disappear; as the Turanians probably did before the Aryans in Europe, and as the North American Indians have done before the English in America. But a numerous population which has once rooted itself in a country is never entirely extirpated. Even in the history of the Israelites and Canaanites when extirpation was enjoined by the strongest religious sanctions, the extirpation was never completed. A conquered race may be depressed, degraded, they may be diminished in numbers. and reduced to thraldom, but a certain portion of them at all events survive, and sooner or later they intermarry with their conquerors.

On the other hand it may be laid down that the more slowly one race conquers another, the more thoroughly is the first race displaced by the second. When under some great leader one race vanquishes another in one or two great battles, as was the case for instance at the Norman conquest of England, the conquerors take the position of nobles, and the conquered of subjects, but the conquered race is still there, with hardly any diminution of its numbers, and gradually by sheer force of numbers it swallows up the conquerors and amalgamates them with itself. Far different was the course of events when the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain. No single great leader is even named; and there were no great armies. But in innumerable

small expeditions petty chiefs of petty tribes led their people, men, women and children to seek new homes in the fertile island. Their ambition was not for earldoms and dignities but for comfortable homesteads and good bits of arable land. It was a struggle for subsistence between opposing village communities in which the Saxons' sword hewed its way along the southern and eastern coast of the island and at last into our own central Mercia; and this was going on during a confused period of at least two hundred years. It was, therefore, that kind of invasion which is most destructive to the defeated people. Nevertheless some of them must have remained, at least as bondsmen and bondswomen, if in no higher capacity. The proportion, doubtless, varied in the different parts of England, and to those varying proportions we have now no clue. But the conclusion to which we are driven is that, leaving Wales and Cornwall out of the question, there must be an admixture, large or small, of Keltic blood in the veins of the modern English nation.

But it is time that we turned to consider the extension of the Germans on the other side, that is as against the Slavonians. It is a point in history which is often neglected or forgotten, that the eastern parts of the kingdom of Prussia, that is the provinces of East and West Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, were originally Slavonic countries. The fate of the name Slavonian is remarkable. In their own language it meant glorious; "Slava" meant glory. Thus when the Russian general Suwarrow took Ismail from the Turks he announced his success to the empress Catherine in a despatch of only two lines, "Slava Bogo, slava yam," "Glory to God and glory to you, I have taken Ismail, and here I am." But so many of the Slavs were conquered by the Germans and reduced to bondage that in all German dialects, including our own, the word "slavish," and "slave" have come to mean, not glorious persons, but persons reduced to bondage. The German conquests over Slavonians began early, but they were continued in the middle ages by the Military Knights of the German Order. The German Order, like the Orders of Templars and Hospitallers were originally founded for the defence of Palestine, but the Knights soon found