In this little world there is a story attached to every word; and never more than when it is the wrong word.  For instance, we may say that in certain cases the word Roman actually means Greek.  The Greek Patriarch is sometimes called the Roman Patriarch; while the real Roman Patriarch, who actually comes from Rome, is only called the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium.  The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundred very vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmen by two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merely decadent and the notion that the Middle Ages were merely dark.  As a fact, even the Dark Ages were not merely dark.  And even the Byzantine Empire was not merely Byzantine.  It seems a little unfair that we should take the very title of decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yet more stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city.  I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a word as “Constantinopolitan.”  But it would surely be a better word for stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish.  But for the Moslems and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome.  Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city, and though and priest or soldier who came out of it might be speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman.  Its critics in these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation.  But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation.  Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a sounder historical instinct, “The monks of the imperial race.”  The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor.  That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see of Rome sometimes bear the strange name of “The Romans.”

Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other.  We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture; not half so much.  The people who say that parliaments or pictures or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic race from the north can be disposed of by the simple question:  why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?  Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the neighbourhood of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace of Homer?  Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion is no longer largely shared.  Anyhow it seems strange that the roads of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons; and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came from Germany.  If I looked about in these