strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461] It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government--if indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before--to develop in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged against the Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of Byzantium to the physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed the moment we compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told by Gregory of Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a typical product of decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian Chilperic, "the Nero of France," or of his father, less ill-famed, Clothaire, the slayer of children, the polygamist, the strictly orthodox Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will remunerate us for all the good we do" to his priests.[462] Odious women were as powerful in Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of Brunehild is not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury, parricide, fratricide, filicide, assassination, massacre, debauchery, are if possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told by the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation of Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the heads. One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue," _àpropos_ of the character of Totila, has given one of his editors (Bohn ed. iv, 505) the opportunity to assert that the "natural superiority" of the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the moral equals of Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited, iv, 181) on the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head Sismondi declares (_Histoire des Français_, ed. 1821, i, 403-4; _Fall of the Roman Empire_, i, 263) that "there was not a Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (_History of the Germanic Empire_, 1834, i, 10) improves on this to the extent of asserting that "those abominable princes generally--such were their premature vices--died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise that, Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, p. 43), his stock was specially liable to degeneration through indulgence. But Motley, whose Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times reaches nearly the lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingian _race_ had been exhausted by _producing a race_ of heroes." Any formula avails to support the dogma that "the German was loyal as