Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth centuries resumed the work on other lines.  This defeat of Varus and the legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed.  To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation.  To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught us.  But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe.  It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part.  Roman missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest.  Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope’s domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants.  The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans.  Spiritually they were thus lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement of the Middle Ages.  Rome had given the framework of a great system, and into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when they swept down to the Aegean.  They came as migrant hordes, and in the area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the geographical configurations of the Continent.  Among them France and England had the advantage.  They gained their unity as nations earlier than any other countries of the West—­England in a form which has lasted substantially unaltered for six hundred years.  Spain, which had been torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic.  But Italy and Germany—­and especially the latter—­remained disintegrated until our own time.  Both gained their union about the same time, fifty years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit.  Italy, naturally a compact