In this belief our oldest common ancestors, the parent nation of civilization, the Teutons whom the Romans called Germans, boldly opposed the advancing world-dominion of the Romans.  Did they not then see before their eyes the higher bloom of the Roman provinces near them, the more refined enjoyments in them, and, in addition, laws, judgment-seats, rods, and axes in superabundance?  Were not the Romans willing enough to allow them to share in all these blessings?  Did they not experience, in the case of several of their own princes who had allowed themselves to be persuaded that war against such benefactors of humanity was rebellion, proofs of the lauded Roman clemency, since Rome adorned these submissive lords with kingly titles, with generalships in their armies, and with Roman fillets, and gave them, if, perchance, they had been driven out by their compatriots, maintenance and a place of refuge in their colonies?  Had they no feeling for the advantages of Roman culture, as, for example, for the better organization of their armies, in which even an Arminius did not disdain to learn the trade of war?  None of all these ignorances or negligences is to be charged against them.  Their descendents even adopted the culture of the Romans as soon as they could do it without loss of their freedom and in so far as it was possible without impairment of their individuality.  Why did they, then, thus struggle for several generations in sanguinary war, ever renewed with the same virulence?  A Roman author makes their leaders ask “whether anything was then left for them except either to assert their freedom or to die before they became slaves?” Freedom meant to them that they remained Germans, that they continued to decide their affairs independently, in conformity with their national genius, and, likewise in conformity with this spirit, that they continued to go forward in their development and transmitted this independence to their posterity; slavery meant to them all the blessings which the Romans offered them, because in that case they must be something else than Germans—­they might be half Romans.  It is self-evident, they presuppose, that every one would rather die than become thus, and that a true German can wish to live only that he may be and remain forever a German and may train all that belong to him to be Germans also.

They have not all died; they have not seen slavery; they have bequeathed liberty to their children.  All the modern world owes it to their stubborn resistance that it exists as it does.  If the Romans had succeeded in subjugating them also and, as the Roman everywhere did, in eradicating them as a nation, then the entire future development of mankind would have taken a direction that we cannot imagine would have been more pleasant.  We, the immediate heirs of their land, their language, and their thought, owe it to them that we be still Germans, that the stream of primitive and independent life still bear us on; to them we owe everything that we have since become