The German _Franks_, under Clovis, established their kingdom in Gaul 481 A.D. The _Angles_ and _Saxons_ in 446 A.D. did the same in Britain. The _Ostrogoths_ had their own kingdom in northern Italy and southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the _Visigoths_ ruling in Spain, the "northern deluge" had in the fifth century practically submerged the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber wreck of a Roman empire. From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the _Anglo-Saxon_ and the _Latin_. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies the difference between these two great divisions of the human family, and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas. When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws, literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch. The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were content in the words of Ataulf--"to renew and maintain by Gothic strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying institutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished with the enormous vitality drawn from the conquering race, which race was in turn conquered by Roman ideals. So, in the conflict now existing between Spain and the United States, we see the Spaniard, the child of the Romans; valorous, picturesque, cruel, versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see the child of the simple Angles and Saxons, no less brave, but just, and with an enthusiasm and confiding integrity which seems to endow him with an imperishable youth. [Footnote A: The famous Gothic code established by him still linger in much of Spanish jurisprudence.] CHAPTER VI.