THE GERMAN WOMEN.

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Some influence upon these peculiar relations of the female sex among the Germans may be ascribed to climate. That the German climate had no injurious effect upon health, nor even upon beauty of form, we may easily infer from the descriptions of the Romans. Moreover, physical development, especially that of the women, was not so early in these colder latitudes, as in warmer countries. The late marriages of the Germans excited the particular attention of the Romans. Tacitus says, they believed this custom to be necessary to maintain the vigour of the race. Certain it is that this custom must have essentially contributed towards the high consideration, towards the freer position of the female sex. Where bodily maturity, as in many southern countries of Asia, is so early, that marriages even border upon childhood ;—where women become mothers even at the tenderest age; there the choice for life can be no free choice; there, even if the laws do allow polygamy, great, almost insuperable obstacles exist to the full development of the faculties of the soul in the female, and to the dignity which she is entitled to by nature.

The wife, it is true, received no dowry among the Germans; on the contrary, the suitor, as among most nations of antiquity, had to present a gift to the father, ransom-money, as it were. But we must not thence conclude that the father sold his daughter as his property. There was a great and essential distinction between the Asiatic and the German custom. In Asia it is the rule that the husband shall not see the bride until the marriage be actually concluded; in Germany, on the contrary, it was the custom that the suitor and his beloved should be acquainted with one another, and that a long friendly intercourse should precede their union. The alliance was contracted by free choice; and it was chiefly this free choice, and not the simplicity of manners alone, that made the marriages of the Germans in their strictness and happy concord appear to the Romans comething so totally different from anything they had been accustomed to among themselves.

If abductions were frequent among the Germans even in carly times, if Arminius himself carried off his Thusnelda, still we must not assume that violence was thereby offered to her inclinations; the father alone was his enemy,

weapon.

and so remained. In the state of things we have described, it may have often happened that the views of the father were opposed to the lovers and their choice, and that he would not ratify the contract which free inclination had concluded. The wedding-gift the wife received is also worthy of notice; a portion of it consisted of a war-horse, a shield, and some I do not conceive that this custom was universal ; in all probability it prevailed chiefly among the noble families, and the present may not have been meant merely as a symbol, but for actual use. For the women accompanied the army in war, and took charge of the wounded; they frequently restored a losing fight; and if the result was disastrous, often by a voluntary death gave the astonished Romans an unparalleled example of lofty courage.

Thus among this people woman had her part in every great and honourable enterprise, even in those which man regarded as his highest distinction, the pride and the joy of his life.

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To place a rapid sketch of history before our eyes, it is necessary to touch anew upon facts that have been long known. The only thing that in this embarrassment inspires the historian with some degree of confidence is, that the glorious recollections of the past, the great subjects of history carry in themselves a perennial charm; that they remain in a certain sense ever new; and appear in a brighter light to us the more our own lives expand. As the past alone teaches us to gaze with a tranquil eye upon the present; so an eventful present throws light in various ways upon the darkness of the past. How many a page of history, otherwise unintelligible, has, since the occurrences of recent years, received a totally new light! It is a common idea, that the migration of the northern nations was a deluge, as it were, of countless hosts of barbarians, and that, from the eastern frontiers of China down to the western coasts of Spain, a universal restless frenzy, an involuntary impulse, had suddenly seized on all savage tribes and swept, driven, and precipitated them along, till the old civilization was totally destroyed, and the barbarism of the middle age introduced. In reality, and viewed in their historical connection, however, these events present a very different aspect. At first, the Germans and Romans only really took part in them. The Huns, the only

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people, not Germanic and coming immediately from Asia, who exercised any influence over this migration, were so little numerous, and their influence was so insignificant, that the development of what had been long ripe for development, would upon the whole have occurred, even without this people, exactly as it did.

Scarcely any other great historical event was so slowly prepared, and brought about-aye even for centuries, so gradually and step by step,-as the migration of the northern nations; that is to say, the armed occupation of the provinces of the Roman empire by the Germans, and their final conquest of the four principal regions of western Europe: Italy, France, Spain, and England. There were two great but simple causes for this event. It had become a necessity to the Germans, in their northern seats amidst a growing population, to send out colonies in order to rid themselves of their surplus numbers. In whatever direction they sought out new abodes, whether in the west, the south, or the south-east, they came in contact with the wide-spread Roman empire. Hence their many great and oft-renewed wars with the Romans, which from the first appearance of the Teutones and Cimbri, somewhat more than a hundred years before the birth of Christ, until the conquest of Rome by Alaric, king of the Goths, lasted full five hundred years. Even those first northern strangers, that struck so much terror into Rome, merely sought new dwelling-places. Not destructive conquest, not a predatory expedition, but colonization, was their object, by fair means, or, if this were unavailing, by recurrence to force. Land, in return for military service, according to the universal Germanic custom, this it was which they demanded on peaceable conditions. A province was to be ceded to them, and in return, as faithful auxiliaries, they would place the general levy of their force at disposal for military service. They came, it is true, as armed military settlers; but even then always peaceably negotiating at first, as did all who, for five centuries, down to the time of Alaric, followed them from the north to the frontiers of the Roman empire. At a later period the Teutones and the Cimbri would easily have obtained their object; and many an emperor would have accounted himself fortunate, by the cession of a province, to gain so noble a reinforcement for his army. A few centuries

before the Cimbrian war, when southern and western Europo was still broken up into a number of petty states, it would have been even easy for these nations to acquire new seats in some quarter or another, by fair means or by force. But now, as they had to encounter all-powerful Rome in her fullest strength and bloom, their valour was forced to yield after a few fruitless victories to superior military art;-they were destroyed.

According to the universal tradition, which in this case history fully confirms, the same cause which had brought the Cimbri and Teutones into conflict with the Romans, namely, a population in the north outgrowing the productions of the soil,-led the Swiss also and the Suabians to their present seats. To what this increasing population in the north and the consequent necessity for emigration were attributable, we cannot state with precision or in detail; but in the fact itself there is nothing improbable. If central and southern Germany was at that time, by reason of its extensive forests, much more rugged than at present; if then agriculture was thereby infinitely more restricted in those regions than it now is; If it was even made a matter subordinate to the chase; yet, as has been already observed, this remark by no means applies to northern Germany, or to those parts more contiguous to the coast. In these northernmost seats of the Germans, agriculture was widely extended; the population might be numerous, and relatively too numerous. At the present day we can observe, perhaps in Switzerland and Suabia only, how with a healthy and prolific race, and with a soil of scanty production, the necessity of relieving themselves of a part of their superfluous population is evinced in emigrations. or other enterprises. In Sweden, Denmark, and northern Germany this custom does not seem now to be prevalent; but how much have not the tillage of the land, the food, the mode of living, and, with these even the race, been altered! The second great cause of the migrations was the ever-increasing feebleness and degeneracy of the constitution of the Roman empire, which at last depopulated the provinces, and thus facilitated the irruptions and the settlements of the armed colonists from the north, and favoured their enterprises in every way.

I shall now resume the thread of the historical narrative,

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but shall touch upon those events, those characters only, which constitute an epoch; for in them it is that the spirit of the time is revealed. It is not my desire or my object to go over once more the whole series and succession of events, but rather to suggest new reflections upon well-known facts.

The Romans came for the second time in contact with the Germans during Caesar's sanguinary conquest of Gaul, which paved the way to his sovereignty and became its foundation. The Suabian king, Ariovistus, one on whom the Romans, after their manner, had long before conferred the very significant, always important, and often dangerous title, of friend of the Roman people, had acquired a settlement in that country by a treaty with one of the Gallic nations. Cæsar waged war against him, forced him to withdraw, and made incursions into Germany, which he was the first to describe as an eyewitness. But not upon the better equipment of his army, nor upon his superiority in the art of war, did he alone rely. Against some of the German tribes he carried on war in a manner at once so faithless and so cruel, that when he demanded a thanksgiving in the senate for the victories he had obtained, his demand was rejected, and his enemies, Cato in particular, declared that for the honour of the Roman name he should be delivered up to those tribes.

Very different was the manner in which the Romans treated the subjugated nations. The Greeks they treated mildly (setting aside individual acts of violence), as well as all Græco-Asiatic nations, and deluded them in every way with phantoms of freedom and a mock continuation of their old national existence. Against the western and northern nations in Spain and France they waged a war of extermination. History can scarcely name a more sanguinary war than that in which Cæsar achieved the final conquest of Gaul.

To replace the void thus caused, the colonies were chiefly directed thitherward. Historians for the most part, according to their respective opinions and judgments, speak only of battles, and of the concerns of rulers, of their virtues and their faults. The still workings of plastic mind and toil are passed over in silence, till at last, after centuries perhaps, the great result of this latent activity bursts suddenly upon our astonished eyes. How instructive would it not be, if we had a detailed account of the process whereby France and Spain,