Miscellanies, chiefly addresses, academical and historical Volume т. 5

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 ...still conterminous, though the frontier was pushed back. The thing to be desired was to sustain between them--as a sort of buffer that should break German assault--a half-civilized high-spirited people, intelligent enough to estimate Eoman power, proud of alliance and honours, but aware of its own essential inferiority to the mighty Empire. Such a people, well armed and well supported by Eoman resources, and taught all the arts of Eoman war, would have been worth half-adozen armies; but to maintain in them a free spirit was essential to success, and this free spirit was dreaded by the Eomans as contagious. Agricola planned to conquer Ireland (says Tacitus, who seemed to approve the policy) lest the knowledge that the Irish were free should make the Britons less contented in vassalage. It was because the Eomans systematically broke the spirit of every nation whom they conquered, and allowed of none but imperial armies, that the neighbour barbarians found no resistance in the provinces, when (from whatever cause) imperial troops were not at hand. Thus little good resulted to the world's history from the Eoman conquest of the ruder populations of Gaul, or from the complete conquest of Britain and of Dacia. Even wild animals (says the Caledonian orator in Tacitus), if you keep them caged up, forget their courage. The Britons and the Dacians were not merely tamed; they were cowed and unmanned. To have subdued all Germany in this way would have been useless. Charlemagne at length undertook the problem, which had been too hard for Trajan and Marcus Antoninus; but he was already as much German as Gaulish, and his chief strugg lewas against Saxony. The next great gain to civilization was in Poland--in Hungary--and in Southern Eussia. When Herodotus wrote, the whole ...