If the foregoing criticism be valid, it must be further turned against the expressions of Bishop Stubbs concerning the effect of the Teutonic conquest in setting up the Romance literatures. "The breath of life of the new literatures," he writes (_Const. Hist._ 4th ed. i, 7), "was Germanic.... The poetry of the new nations is that of the leading race ... even in Italy it owes all its sweetness and light to the _freedom_ which has breathed from beyond the Alps." Here the thesis shifts unavowedly from "race" to "freedom," and all the while no data whatever are offered for generalisations which decide in a line some of the root problems of sociology. A laborious scholar can thus write as if in matters of total historic generalisation there were needed neither proof nor argument, while the most patient research is needed to settle a single detail of particular history. On the whole, it may be psychologically accurate to say that the invaders, by setting up a new caste of freemen where before all classes were alike subordinate to the imperial tyranny, created a variation in the direction of a new self-government, the spectacle of privilege stimulating the unprivileged to desire it. But any conquest whatever might do this; and it is a plain paralogism to conclude that where the subjugated people does _not_ react the fault is its own, while where it does the credit is to go to the conquerors. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to reason that the Norman Conquest of England was as such the bringer of the liberty later achieved there. Yet, as regards the Teutonic invasions of Italy, the principle passes current on all sides; and Guizot endorses it in one lecture (_Hist. de la civ. en France_, i, 7ième leçon, _end_), though in the next he gives an objective account which practically discredits it. As regards the ideals of justice and freedom in general, the Teutonic laws, being framed not for a normal barbarian state but for a society of conquerors and conquered, were in some respects rather more iniquitous than the Roman. In particular the Ostrogothic laws of Theodoric and his son punish the crimes of the rich by fines, and put to death the poor for the same offences; while the degradation of the slave is in all the early Teutonic codes constantly insisted on. (Cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat. Chr._ 4th ed. ii, 36, and refs. Roman law also, however, differed in practice for rich and poor. Cp. Cassiodorus, l. ii, pp. 24, 25; iii, 20, 36; iv, 39; v, 14, and Finlay, ed. cited. i, 236.) Whether or not Gregory the Great, as has been asserted (Milman, as cited, p. 52), was the first to free slaves on the principle of human equality, he did not get the idea from the Teutons.