As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system; they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late period; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions, and the construction of the great roads which united Rome with her most distant provinces, had brought them into constant communication with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received them from their conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all this they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for millenium after millenium. The old world employed such force and vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These also were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but dominated by analysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation for those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in modern society.