It is not with the history of the barbarians that we have to concern ourselves, for relation is not our province. We are aware that, at the epoch in question, the conquerors of the Empire were almost all of the same race, all Germans, except some Slavonic tribes, as the Alani, for example. We are likewise aware that they were all pretty nearly in the same state of civilisation. Some difference might exist amongst them, according to the greater or less degree of contact into which they had respectively come with the Roman provincials. Thus there is no doubt that the Goths were more advanced and milder in their manners than the Franks. But considering things in a general point of view, and with reference to their results upon ourselves, this early diversity amongst the barbaric tribes in civilisation is of no importance. It is the general state of society amongst the barbarians that it behoves us to ascertain; and this is a subject which is involved in considerable difficulty. We can understand with comparative ease the Roman municipal system and the Christian church, because their influence is perpetuated even to our own days, and we discover traces of them in a multitude of actual institutions and circumstances, affording us a thousand means of identifying and explaining them. But the manners and the social state of the barbarians have completely perished; we are reduced to the necessity of evoking them either from the most ancient historical monuments, or by an effort of the imagination.