Spain supplied a more hopeful field; the position of the country hindered later Teutonic settlements; but the Saracen conqueror came before West-Goth and Roman had been thoroughly fused into one people. Hence came the distinctive character of Spanish history, the history of a people whose national life was formed by the need laid upon them of daily working out the Eternal Question in its sternest shape. Northern Gaul, unlike Spain and Italy, lay open to continued reinforcements of the Teutonic element within it. _Francia_ was an unbroken land lying far away on both sides of the Rhine, and the division into _Austria_ and _Neustria_ forestalls the later division into _Francia Teutonica_ and _Francia Latina_. The rise to power of the Austrasian Mayors was almost as much a Teutonic conquest of a Latin land as had been the first conquest by Chlodowig, and the settlement of the Normans in the tenth century brought in another Teutonic element in one part of the land. France then, in the narrower sense of that name, differs from Spain and Italy in the presence of these later Teutonic elements; but in Aquitaine and Provence they had little force; it is there, rather than anywhere else, that the normal result of the movements of the fifth century may be best studied. In the modern world of all, where those South-Gaulish lands have helped to make up the great nation of modern France, it is undoubtedly in that French nation that we can best study the threefold elements of a Romance people. The præ-Roman, the Roman, the Teutonic, elements are all there; the whole, as a whole, is none of the three, but the result of their fusion; but the whole, looked at from special sides only, may well be called by any name of the three. The blood must be mainly Celtic--in the south Iberian and Ligurian--but with some Roman and some Teutonic infusion. The speech is Latin, but with a larger Teutonic infusion than would be thought at first sight. The political history is that of a Teutonic kingdom, but a kingdom modified by planting its Teutonic kingship among the Latin-speaking folk of an originally Celtic land. The elements are fused into a whole; yet they still stand side by side; we cannot say that the Frank assimilated the Roman or that the Roman assimilated the Frank. The Frank learned the speech of the Roman; but in learning it he modified it, and he gave it his own name. The modern Frenchman is neither Roman nor Frank; he is rather the outcome of the settlement of the two in a land in which elements earlier than either have not been without their influence on both.