the currents of evolution.

So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which
they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal
or epochal defect. They were not fickle when they held out (in
Wales) for eight centuries against the barbarian onslaughts which
brought the rest of the Roman empire down in two or three; or
when they resisted for two hundred years those Normans who had
conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a decade. This very quality, in
old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic
of extreme age; "I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash." says
Llywarch Hen. I think that gives the clew to the whole position.
The race was at the end of its manvantaric period; the Race Soul
had lost control of the forces that bound its organism together;
centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse
that marks the cycles of youth and growth. It had eaten into
individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at
tangents. We see the same thing in any decadent people; by
which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras,
and on the verge of a pralaya. And remember that a pralaya, like
a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is
simply a means for restoring strength and youth.

How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what
settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather
from two not much noticed facts. First: Caesar, conqueror of the
Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day,
landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without
accomplishing anything in particular. But it was the central
seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph
was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than
anything else he ever did. He set it above his victories over
Pompey. Second: the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able
to put in the field against him three million men: not so far
short of the number France has been able to put in the field
in the recent war. Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have
raised such an army--in France. Caesar is said to have killed
some five million Gauls before he conquered them. By ordinary
computations, that would argue a population of some thirty
millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of Diviciacos a
century after the latter's death; and even if that computation
is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there