Mommsen, in one of those primitively biassed anti-Celtic passages which bar his pretensions to rank as a philosophic historian, declares of the elusive Celtæ of antiquity, in dogged disregard of the question (so often put by German scholars and so often answered against him[479]) whether they were not Germans, that, "always occupied with combats and heroic actions, they were scattered far and wide, from Ireland to Spain and Asia Minor; but all their enterprises melted like snow in spring; they created nowhere a great State, and developed no specific civilisation."[480] The passage would be exactly as true if written of the Teutons. Every tendency and quality which Mommsen in this context[481] specifies as Celtic is strictly applicable to the race supposed to be so different from the Celts. "Attachment to the natal soil, so characteristic of the Italians and _Germans_, was foreign to them.... Their political constitution was imperfect; not only was their national unity feebly recognised,[482] as happens with all nations at their outset, but the separate communities were lacking in unity of aim, in solid control, in serious political sentiment, and in persistence. The sole organisation of which they were capable was the military,[483] in which the ties of discipline dispensed the individual from personal efforts." "They preferred the pastoral life to agriculture." "Always we find them ready to roam, or, in other words, to begin the march ... following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage"; and so on. Such were in strict truth the peculiarities of the Germani, from Tacitus to the Middle Ages; while, on the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that not merely the Gauls but the Britons of Cæsar's day were much better agriculturists than the Germani.[484]