“The Romans justly considered the German nation as an aboriginal, pure, and unmixed race of people. They resembled themselves alone; and like the specifically similar plants of the field, which, springing from a pure seed, not raised in the hot-bed of a garden, but germinating in the healthy, free, unsheltered soil, do not differ from each other by varieties; so, also, among the thousands of the simple German race, there was but one determined and equal form of body. Their chest was wide and strong; their hair yellow, and with young children it was of a dazzling white. Their skin was also white, their eyes blue, and their glance bold and piercing. Their powerful gigantic bodies, which the Romans and Gauls could not behold without fear, displayed the strength that nature had given to this people; for, according to the testimony of some of the ancient writers, their usual height was seven feet. From their earliest youth upward they hardened their bodies by all devisable means. New-born infants were dipped in cold water, and the cold bath was continued during their whole lives as the strengthening renovator, by both boys and girls, men and women. The children ran about almost naked, and effeminate nations wondered how those of the Germans, without cradles or swaddling bands, should grow up to the very fullest bloom of health. “Cæsar, Tacitus, and Suetonius, with many others, have pointed to one and the same characteristic of the Germans, as the secret of their power and prosperity. The Kelt had everywhere yielded to the eagles of Rome, while the Teuton everywhere checked their flight. Amazed, and even alarmed, at those tall fair-haired, blue-eyed enemies, who had to be conquered with gold instead of steel, Tacitus examines the reasons of their prowess, and finds it in the soberness of their blood, in their reverence for women and for the laws of nature, in their deference to parental authority and their marriages of maturity. ‘Chastity is a custom with them,’ says the ‘De Moribus Germanorum,’ and a passage to the same effect might be cited from Cæsar. Those southern soldiers and statesmen saw, in truth, with a terrible sense of overhanging fate, that race of hardy, chaste, home-loving, free and fearless barbarians, of whom the Emperor Titus said, ‘Their bodies are great, but their souls are greater.’ The tone of Tacitus is that of a man who bitterly feels how much greater, after all, as a moral being, the barbarian may be than the civilized man, when civilization recognizes no higher aim than material splendor, and that utility which subserves material wants. Other civilizations than that of the Empire may read a lesson in those brief pages where the philosopher of a worn-out world records his impression of the races from which the world was hereafter to be reconstituted.”—_Menzies._