Given a couple of centuries of this, we really begin to see some very encouraging results.  We realize that for once we are being allowed to study a civilization in its earlier stages, to be present almost at its birth, to watch the methods of the Master-builder in the making of a race.  Gazing at similar developments in the days of Egypt and Babylon, we guessed vaguely that they must have been of slowest growth.  Here at last one takes place under our eyes, and it does not need so many ages after all.  There is no study more fascinating than to trace the slow changes stamping themselves ineradicably upon the Teutonic mind and soul during these misty far-off centuries of turmoil.

On the whole, of course, the sixth, seventh, and even the eighth centuries form a period of strife.  The Teutons had spent too many ages warring against one another in petty strife to abandon the pleasure in a single generation.  Men fought because they liked fighting, much as they play football to-day.  Then, too, there came another great outburst of Semite religious enthusiasm.  Mahomet[9] started the Arabs on their remarkable career of conquest.

THE MAHOMETAN OUTBURST

Mahomet himself died (632) before he had fully established his influence even over Arabia:  his successors had practically to reconquer it.  Yet within five years of his death the Arabs had mastered Syria.[10] They spread like some sudden, unexpected, immeasurable whirlwind.  Ancient Persia went down before them.  By 640 they had trampled Egypt under foot, and destroyed the celebrated Alexandrian library.[11] They swept over all Africa, completely obliterating every trace of Vandal or of Roman.  Their dominion reached farther east than that of Alexander.  They wrested most of its Asiatic possessions from the pretentious Empire at Constantinople, and reduced that exhausted State to a condition of weakness from which it never arose.  Then, passing on through their African possessions, they entered Spain and overthrew the kingdom of the Visigoths.[12] It was a storm whose end no man could measure, whose coming none could have foreseen.  And then, just a century after Mahomet’s death, the Arabs, pressing on through Spain, encountered the Franks on the plains of France.

A thousand years had passed since Semitic Carthage had fallen before Aryan Rome.  Now once again the Semites, far more dangerous because in the full tide of the religious frenzy of their race, threatened to engulf the Aryan world.  They were repulsed by the still sturdy Franks under their great leader, Charles Martel, at Tours.  The battle of Tours[13] was only less momentous to the human race than that of Chalons.  What the Arab domination of Europe would have meant we can partly guess by looking at the lax and lawless states of Northern Africa to-day.  These fair lands, under both Roman and Vandal, had long been sharing the lot of Aryan Europe; they seemed destined to follow in its growth and fortune.  But the Arab conquest restored them to Semitism, made Asia the seat from which they were to have their training, attached them to the chariot of sloth instead of that of effort.  What they are to-day, all Europe might have been.