ke a tide, at
once destroying and revivifying, over the exhausted though still
fertile plains of the Po and the Adige. Are we to call it a moving
people or an advancing army? Are we to call its leaders (_duces_, from
_ducere_ to lead), heads of clans and families, or captains and
generals? Finally, is the land to be invaded, or is the land to be
settled? To all these questions the only answer is to be found in the
conception of the absolute union of both the kinds of functions
described. A people is moving from a home whose borders have proved
too narrow for its increasing numbers; an army is conquering a new
home, where plenty will take the place of want, and luxury of
privation. It is not an army marching at the command of a strongly
centralized power to conquer a rich neighbor, and force a defeated
enemy to pay it service or tribute. It is a body which, when it has
conquered as an army, will occupy as a people; when it is established
as a people, will still remain an army. The sword was not turned into
the ploughshare; but the power to wield the sword had given the right
to till the land, and soon the power to hold the land was to give the
right to wear the sword. It was the conquest of a highly civilized
agricultural people--whose very civilization had reduced them to a
stage of moral weakness which rendered them totally unfit to defend
themselves--by a semi-barbarous people, agricultural also, but rude,
uncivilized, independent, owning no rulers but their family or
military chiefs.

The conquerors took possession of the country simply as they would
take possession of a larger farm than they had before owned. Their
riches were only such as served for the support of men--herds, land,
wine and corn. They needed cultivators for their large farm, so
instead of destroying every one with fire and sword, they spared those
of the weak inhabitants of the land who had survived the first
onslaught, in order that they might make use of farmers to cultivate
their new possessions. In most cases they did not make slaves of them,
but tributaries; and after the land had been portioned evenly among
the soldiers of the invading host, the original holders of the land
tilled it themselves, under a system somewhat kindred to the metayer
system as to-day existent in Tuscany and elsewhere, paying, according
to the usual custom adopted by the northern conquerors of Italy,
one-third of the produce[1] to their new masters. The whole
organiz