German rule. The meager and ambiguous remarks of Tacitus on the
state of domestic and civil economy among the inhabitants of Germany
need no longer detain anyone, in the presence of the available
archaeological and historical evidence. The circumstantial evidence of
the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the
slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate
unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the
territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as
marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on
the land. And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the
Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody
ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and
princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of
superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile
populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery,
assassinations and supersession.

Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would
leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this
superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable
life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of
their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject
populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable
exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the
neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human
raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class
were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed
and crime went on among the masters.

Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years,
there is no need to speak at length. With transient, episodic,
interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these
beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and
mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise,
resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace. In
all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no
means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the
rest of western Europe, except in degree. It is of the sam