to share in all these blessings? Did they
not experience, in the case of several of their own princes who had
allowed themselves to be persuaded that war against such benefactors
of humanity was rebellion, proofs of the lauded Roman clemency,
since Rome adorned these submissive lords with kingly titles, with
generalships in their armies, and with Roman fillets, and gave
them, if, perchance, they had been driven out by their compatriots,
maintenance and a place of refuge in their colonies? Had they no
feeling for the advantages of Roman culture, as, for example, for the
better organization of their armies, in which even an Arminius did
not disdain to learn the trade of war? None of all these ignorances
or negligences is to be charged against them. Their descendents even
adopted the culture of the Romans as soon as they could do it without
loss of their freedom and in so far as it was possible without
impairment of their individuality. Why did they, then, thus struggle
for several generations in sanguinary war, ever renewed with the same
virulence? A Roman author makes their leaders ask "whether anything
was then left for them except either to assert their freedom or to die
before they became slaves?" Freedom meant to them that they remained
Germans, that they continued to decide their affairs independently,
in conformity with their national genius, and, likewise in conformity
with this spirit, that they continued to go forward in their
development and transmitted this independence to their posterity;
slavery meant to them all the blessings which the Romans offered them,
because in that case they must be something else than Germans--they
might be half Romans. It is self-evident, they presuppose, that every
one would rather die than become thus, and that a true German can wish
to live only that he may be and remain forever a German and may train
all that belong to him to be Germans also.

They have not all died; they have not seen slavery; they have
bequeathed liberty to their children. All the modern world owes it to
their stubborn resistance that it exists as it does. If the Romans had
succeeded in subjugating them also and, as the Roman everywhere did,
in eradicating them as a nation, then the entire future development of
mankind would have taken a direction that we cannot imagine would
have been more pleasant. We, the immediate heirs of their land, their
language, and their thought, owe it to them that we be still Germ