o the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of
having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift;
Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of
theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of
natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose
statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese
temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of
Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine
and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it
pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and
lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean?
I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things
do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, "No man dictates
to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command," were shaping and
moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual
liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think
and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came
constitutional government in England, and republican government in
America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of
these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their
stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or
legislature.

Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing
French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer
and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and
priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics,
Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly
individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It
was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or
their roving singer champions, that German literature came; but from
the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the
Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of
civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when
they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the
fifteenth century.

Here is a list of them, of no great interest in themselves, but
showing the direct descent down to the present time; for from the
Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the French Revolution the German states
were with