a Hohenzollern.

It is, perhaps, of all periods in history, the most interesting to
Americans, for then and there our civilization was born. Writing of
the conquest of the British Isles by the Germans, J. R. Green says:
"What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the
one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other
lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered
by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still
remained Roman." The roots of our civilization, are to be dug for in
those days when the German peoples met the imperialism and the
Christianity of Rome, and absorbed and renewed them. The Roman Empire,
tottering on a foundation of, it is said, as many as fifty million
slaves -- even a poor man would have ten slaves, a rich man ten or
twenty thousand -- and overrun with the mongrel races from Syria,
Greece, and Africa, and hiding away the remnants of its power in the
Orient, became in a few centuries an easy prey to our ancestors "of
the stern blue eyes, the ruddy hair, the large and robust bodies."

"Caerula quis stupuit lumina? flavam
Caesariem, et madido torquentem cornua cirro?
Nempe quod haec illis natura est omnibus una,"

writes Juvenal of their resemblance to one another.

By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of
social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German
grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a
poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle
of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265
and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only
represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest
revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities
and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and
industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto
browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the
alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from
the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make
paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the
Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of
France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared
except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw
off his allegiance t