iced nor called a feat. He will be
appalled by the vigour of the Western mind between Augustus and
Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and
treat as one vast State what is, even now, after so many centuries
of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces.

The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period
he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own
kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what
the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.

In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of
the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops
of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The
Wandering of the Peoples which assumes such a dreadful aspect in
Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign
of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the
one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here
we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an
attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He
believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part,
particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In _The Eye-Witness_ he
states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and
powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In _Paris_, an earlier work, he declines to
estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.[3]

In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and
partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established
aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments;
but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at
most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the
fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western
race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of
Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.

Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death
of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in
the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts
of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most
serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here alrea