of that race in France, before alluded to.

In the second half of the fifth century Attila, "the Scourge of God,"
swept down upon Europe with his Huns,--mysterious, terrible, as a fire
out of heaven, and more like an army of demons than men,--destroying
city after city, and driving the people before them, until they came
to Orleans. There they met the combined Roman and Gothic armies.
Theodoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the battlefield. But to
him, and to the Roman general AEtius, belongs the glory of the defeat
of the Huns (451 A.D.).

It was Evaric, the son of this Theodoric, who finally completed the
conquest of the Spanish Peninsula, and with him really commences the
line of Visigoth kings in Spain, and the conversion of that country
into a Gothic empire,[A] entirely independent of Rome.

The German _Franks_, under Clovis, established their kingdom in
Gaul 481 A.D. The _Angles_ and _Saxons_ in 446 A.D. did the same in
Britain. The _Ostrogoths_ had their own kingdom in northern Italy and
southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the _Visigoths_ ruling in Spain,
the "northern deluge" had in the fifth century practically submerged
the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber
wreck of a Roman empire.

From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two
types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the _Anglo-Saxon_
and the _Latin_. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was
complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies
the difference between these two great divisions of the human family,
and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain
and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery
of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas.

When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation
of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws,
literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they
were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and
government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch.

The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already
Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were
content in the words of Ataulf--"to renew and maintain by Gothic
strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying
institutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished
with th