native plants, the madder and the blue woad; and
made coats and mantles of skins, which had already borders of finer fur
introduced from foreign parts. Well-trod commercial roads crossed the
territory from the Rhine to the Vistula in every direction. The foreign
trader, who brought articles of luxury and the gold coins of Rome in
his wagon to the house of the countryman, exchanged them with him for
the highly-prized feathers of the goose, smoked hams, and sausages, the
horns of the ure ox and antlers of the stag, fur skins, and even
articles of toilet, such as the blonde hair of slaves, and a fine
pomade to colour the hair. He bought German carrots, which had been
ordered as a delicacy by his Emperor Tiberius; he beheld with
astonishment in the garden of his German host, gigantic radishes, and
related to his country-people that a German had shown him honeycombs
eight feet long.

The warlike householder, it is true, held his weapons in higher esteem
than his plough, not because agriculture was unimportant or despised,
but because in the free classes there was already an aristocratic
development. For, although the warrior did not employ himself in any
field labour, he insisted upon his household cultivating his ground,
and his bondmen had to pay a tribute in corn and cattle. The bondman
dwelt with his wife and child near his master in special huts, which
were erected on the land that was allotted to him for cultivation.
Freemen were not only associated in communities, but several races were
joined in one confederacy, being by the old constitution knit together
by religious memories and public worship. The boundaries of the
province were marked out, like those of the village, by casts of the
holy hammer, and consecrated by processions of divine cars.
Notwithstanding the numerous feuds of individual tribes, there
were many points of union which served to reconcile and keep them
together,--blood relationship and marriage alliances, similitude in
customs and privileges, and, above all, the feeling of the same origin,
the same language, and those pious rites which keep alive the memory of
ancient communion.

Although the German of Tacitus appears to us as a fierce warrior, who,
clothed in skins, watched with spear and wooden shield over the abatis
which guarded his village against the assaults of enemies; yet this
same German is shown, by the results of new researches, to have been a
householder and landlord. He looked with