Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 155

catch the echo of the strife of the tribes of Latin stock, and kindred peoples, who have wandered into the Italian peninsula. On the edge of history we see the future mistress of the world with Brennus and his tribes from the north beleaguering her. The history of the Roman dominion is but a vast chapter in this long-drawn-out process, in which the governing principle—the ideal of unrestrained conquest—tends at last to reach its inherent and inevitable climax in the realisation of universal dominion. Viewed in its larger relations, the last stage of all—the invasion of the Roman territories by the barbarians of the north and the overthrow of the outward dominion of Rome by the tribesmen —is but part of the same movement slowly reaching its climax in history. For the relationships and the institutions of the later invaders but carry us back to the Greeks of the Homeric age; and the barbarians who overran the Roman empire were dealing, to use Freeman’s words, “not with forefathers, but elder brethren—men whose institutions and whose speech were simply other forms of their own.”* We see them, at last, Markomans and Franks, Goths and Suevi, Vandals and Longobards, Slavs, Angles, and Saxons—each in turn representing last eddies in the great tide of military conquest, each in turn representing the survival of untold ages of movement, of advance, and of military selectionsurging now into the vast arena which the mistress of the world had cleared for them in history, coming to rest now at last in the seats they were finally to occupy, in the visible presence and under the actual thrall of the forms and mechanism of that empire in ) Cf. Chief Periods of European History, by E. A. Freeman, pp. 7, 8.