How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather from two not much noticed facts. First: Caesar, conqueror of the Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day, landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without accomplishing anything in particular. But it was the central seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than anything else he ever did. He set it above his victories over Pompey. Second: the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able to put in the field against him three million men: not so far short of the number France has been able to put in the field in the recent war. Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have raised such an army--in France. Caesar is said to have killed some five million Gauls before he conquered them. By ordinary computations, that would argue a population of some thirty millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of Diviciacos a century after the latter's death; and even if that computation is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there was a very large population; and a large population means always a long and settled civilization. Diviciacos ruled only Gaul and Britain; possible Ireland as well; he may have been a Gaul, a Briton, or an Irishman; very likely there was not much difference in those days. It will be said I am leaving out of account much that recent scholarship has divulged; I certainly am leaving out of account a great many of the theories of recent scholarship, which for the most part make confusion worse confounded. But we know that the lands held by the Celts--let us boldly say, with many of the most learned, the Celtic empire--was vastly larger in its prime than the British Isles and France. Its eastern outpost was Galatia in Asia Minor. You may have read in _The Outlook_ some months ago an article by a learned Serbian, in which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of the Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of the fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an original Celtic population. Bohemia was once the land of the Celtic Boii; and we may take it as an axiom, that no conquest, no racial incursion, ever succeeds in wiping out the conquered people; unless there is such wide disparity, racial and cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers in America and the Indians. There are forces in human nature itself which make this absolute. The conquerors may quite silence the conquered; may treat them with infinite cruelty; may blot out all their records and destroy the memory of their race; but the blood of the conquered will go on flowing through all the generation of the children of the conquerors, and even, it seems probable, tend ever more and more to be the prevalent element.