rance, Germany, Spain, North
Africa, and Italy were ushered into the calendar of mankind, and were
ready to bear the burden when the mighty city on the Tiber let the
sceptre fall from its enfeebled hands.

Rome fell. The more accurate historians of our time correct the old
legend of death from senile decay or from the effect of dissipation.
Races of men, like races of animals, do not die; they are killed. The
physical deterioration of the citizens of Rome was a small matter in its
fall. Fiscal and imperial blunders loosed the frame of its empire. The
resources were still there, but there was none to organise and unify
them. The imperial system--or chaos--ruined Rome. And just when the
demoralisation was greatest, and the Teutonic tribes at the frontiers
were most numerous and powerful, an accident shook the system. A fierce
and numerous people from Asia, the Huns, wandered into Europe, threw
themselves on the Teutonic tribes, and precipitated these tribes upon
the Empire. A Diocletian might still have saved the Empire, but there
was none to guide it. The northern barbarians trod its civilisation
underfoot, and Europe passed into the Dark Ages.

One more application of the evolutionary principle, and we close the
story. The "barbarians"--the Goths and Vandals and their Germanic
cousins--were barbaric only in comparison with the art and letters
of Rome. They had law, polity, and ideals. European civilisation owes
elements to them, as well as to Rome. To say simply that the barbarians
destroyed the institutions of Rome is no adequate explanation of the
Dark Ages. Let us see rather how the Dark Ages were enlightened.

It is now fully recognised that the reawakening of Europe in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries was very largely due to a fresh culture-contact
with the older civilisations. The Arabs had, on becoming civilised,
learned from the Nestorians, who had been driven out of the Greek world
for their heresies, the ancient culture of Greece. They enshrined it
in a brilliant civilisation which it inspired them to establish. By the
ninth century this civilisation was exhibited in Spain by its Moorish
conquerors, and, as its splendour increased, it attracted the attention
of Europe. Some Christian scholars visited Spain, as time went on, but
the Jews were the great intermediaries in disseminating its culture
in Europe. There is now no question about the fact that the rebirth of
positive learning, especially of science