man civilization, and had early received the Christian vivifying teaching. From the Celts emerged the Romanic nations, as they are now called. The other race, the German, broke forth furiously and savagely, and establishing itself upon the Roman ruins, extended a dark and heavy shroud over the dissolving fabric of society. The labor of centuries was required to reinvigorate its remaining and feebly smouldering sparks, which were again to warm and stimulate and fertilize the minds of the Northern barbarians. But as they are the last comers and actors, they proclaim themselves the originators and creators of all the good in modern civilization. Invoking the fallacious and superficial evidence of craniology and physiology, they assert that the comprehension of freedom and of equality was exclusively located in their brains. But history overthrows the condemnatory verdicts, and teaches that the fact was the reverse, and restores to their due share the disappeared, wasted and withered races and nations.

Paleontology teaches that in the animal kingdom, genera and families disappear after having fulfilled their time, or become transmuted and further developed in others, called more perfect. The so-called monsters of the antediluvial world were as perfect in the condition of their existence, as can be the actual living animals, created among different vegetations, a different state of the earth-crust, different combinations of air, gases, atmosphere, and the thereby stimulated productivity of the soil. Animals of the last creation, man included, would have been unable to live when our planet was in the jurassic or even diluvial condition. The animals of every kind belonging to those bygone epochs, were as perfect in their way as the conditions of life and existence required and allowed. An animal world disappeared in revolutions of the globe, revolutions covering it with new strata, and fostering new creations.

The present animal kingdom is subject to the same absolute conditions, but modified or adapted to new combinations, appropriate and adapted to the so-called higher forms and functions.

And so it is, in a higher philosophical appreciation, with races, nations, and even individual families. Their work done, or transmitted to successors, they retire into the background, or even,-above all the so-called historical families they die out. New ones succeed them in the ascension of an infinite spiral. During the periods of their vital activity those races, nations and individual families, answered fully to given and existing conditions, and in given epochs they constituted the acme of general life. For right and for wrong, even dynasties and families embodied, influenced and directed human events during long spaces of time. Now the race enters a new era. The actors of the past disappeared and disappear from the world's stage, in accordance with the same laws that ruled the disappearance of the animal creations of the antediluvian world.

The aspirations for freedom, the struggles for social equality, and even for democratic organization, were familiar to other races as well as the Indo-European or Germans, and fill the history of the past as they do that of the present. The Hebrews belonging to the Semitic or Aramaic stock, represent the most ancient republican and democratic society, with Jehovah for president, and judges for administrators. No social privilege or distinction prevailed among the tribes, excepting that one derived from religious functions, as in the tribe of Levi. Nowadays the Hebrews are held up as deprived of warlike courage and gallantry;-but the times of the Maccabees elevate them to a level with the most glorious military deeds of any nation whatever; and the defence of Jerusalem against the Romans remains unrivalled on the records of de

votion and patriotism. So events give character to men and nations. Modern pride cannot too often be reminded of the Hebrew origin and the humble condition of the teacher of love and humanity, and thus of its highest redeemer. Love of liberty, heroism and civilization do not depend on the phrenological conformation of certain angular depressions in the cerebral cavity; and the races who, today, direct the events of the world, shine in more than one respect in a lustre transmitted to them by preceding

ones.

Greece and Athens will remain for eternity the brilliant stars in the history of the mental and social development of men. The Greek mind does not yield to any other in power, boldness and depth; in many of its productions and conceptions it remains unrivalled; and nevertheless it borrowed many features of civilization from the East, and above all it borrowed therefrom that speculative philosophy, wherein consists one of its greatest splendors.

The Christian cardinal dogma of which many acknowledge the influence on the modern mental and ethical civilization; an influence as powerful as the exclusively moral precepts taught by Christ himself; this dogma derives its essence from the conceptions of divinity prevailing in the East long centuries before Zoroaster's doctrine, which embodying the conceptions of a distant epoch, in a purified form, marked the transition to Christian theology. This last emerged and received its complement from the holy fathers, those disciples of the New-Platonic, and essentially Eastern philosophy.

The claims of the German races to superiority, to having originated out of their individual and special essence a new culture, a new social idea, pregnant with the germs of a higher social maturity and development, and

foreshadowing exclusively the actual tendencies, and aspirations of Europe, and the republican democratic organization of this country-these claims contradict the eternal movement of history, and are not substantiated by her records.

The German destroyers of the Roman world gained dominion principally over the Celts in Gaul, Spain, and Italy. But first of all, those invaders, establishing themselves in the regions which they had conquered, carried there a new political organization as a natural result of conquest; but in the lapse of many centuries, they scarcely produced any effect on the prominent features of character belonging to the conquered.

The Frenchman of the last ten centuries, as well as of our own days, is the same as the Celto-Gaul, who, during the first centuries of the Roman republic, promenaded from the Seine to Asia Minor, ravaged Italy and Rome under Brennus, and boasted that he was able to sustain on his spear the falling roof of heaven. Notwithstanding the admixtures of various German races, as the Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Normans, the Gallo-German-Frenchman, who sprang from the combination, did not lose his ancient bellicose and reckless propensities. Now, as of old, he plunges into a war for the sake of fighting for glory rather than for positive results. In the frozen solitudes of Russia, as recently under the walls of Sebastopol, the French have shown the ancient Gallic character.

In the same way, the Spaniard of our days, notwithstanding the Gothic admixture, is the Celto-Iberian of the times of Carthaginian and Roman domination. The same terrible, cold contempt for his own life, as well as that of others, as described by Pomponius Trogus, was evinced in the murders of the inquisition at home, and in those perpetrated in the Netherlands; it echoes from national

habits in tragedies and songs, and the same character was finally delineated by Chateaubriand. Saragossa recalls the memory of Saguntum and Numantia, and the guerillawarfare practised against Napoleon reminds us of Sertorius and his patriotic struggle against the Romans.

Nearly all the German invaders left their footprints on Italy, some of them, as the Longobards especially, establishing a domination for a couple of centuries. And still the Italian features, the Italian mind, the Italian character in all its variety, from the Alps to Tenarus, has not the slightest resemblance to that of the Germans. If, in some eminent features, the Italians of the Christian centuries differ from the ancient Romans, they nevertheless have nothing in common with the Germans. The remains of these various invaders became quietly absorbed, overflowed, dissolved, decomposed by the powerful creative exuberance of the Italian soil. Circumstances, various events, variously acting, and a peculiar run of human affairs. for about twelve centuries, shaped out the characteristics of the Italians.

In their political organism and internal struggles, for twelve centuries the Italians proclaimed an insurmountable repulsion to centralization, to becoming fused and condensed in one single State. All the efforts of the Papacy stranded against this innate repulsion, as now-a-days the efforts of devoted patriots strand equally against it. Only the iron grasp of ancient Rome subdued this centrifugal proclivity of the various Italiots* tribes and municipalities. But when once that iron band was broken, Italy burst asunder, returning almost naturally to the former state of decentralization-and thus at the distance of

* Italiots are called the inhabitants of ante-Roman; Italians those of post Roman times.