are still preserved, is the earliest specimen of the French language in existence.

In 843 another treaty signed at Verdun, between the two brothers Lothair and Louis and their half-brother Charles, separated for the first time the Netherlands, the Rhine country, Burgundy, and Italy, which became the portion of Lothair; all Germany east of this territory, which went to Louis; and all the territory to the west of it, which went to Charles. Germany and France, therefore, by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, became distinct kingdoms, and modern geography in Europe is born.

From the death of Henry the Fowler, in 936, down to the nomination of Frederick I of Bavaria, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg, to be Margrave of Brandenburg, in 1411, the history of the particular Germany we are studying is swallowed up in the history of these German tribes of central Europe and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is in these years of the seven Crusades, from 1095 to the last in 1248; of Frederick Barbarossa; of the centuries-long quarrel between the Welfs, or Guelphs, and the Waiblingers, or Ghibellines, which were for years in Italy, and are still in Germany, political parties; of the Hanseatic League of the cities to protect commerce from the piracies of a disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning, killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs, Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his biography in the single phrase, “To go to Canossa”; of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy, Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western empire (962), goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a frontier post of the empire under the rule of a Hohenzollern.

It is, perhaps, of all periods in history, the most interesting to Americans, for then and there our civilization was born. Writing of the conquest of the British Isles by the Germans, J. R. Green says: “What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman.” The roots of our civilization, are to be dug for in those days when the German peoples met the imperialism and the Christianity of Rome, and absorbed and renewed them. The Roman Empire, tottering on a foundation of, it is said, as many as fifty million slaves - even a poor man would have ten slaves, a rich man ten or twenty thousand - and overrun with the mongrel races from Syria, Greece, and Africa, and hiding away the remnants of its power in the Orient, became in a few centuries an easy prey to our ancestors “of the stern blue eyes, the ruddy hair, the large and robust bodies.”

“Caerula quis stupuit lumina? flavam
Caesariem, et madido torquentem cornua cirro?
Nempe quod haec illis natura est omnibus una,”

writes Juvenal of their resemblance to one another.

By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265 and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw off his allegiance to the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift; Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean? I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command,” were shaping and moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came constitutional government in England, and republican government in America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or legislature.

Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics, Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or their roving singer