Another reared itself in India, where it broke against the barriers which were opposed to it by Buddha and his disciples. The pure descendants of the Indian and Persian races, the Hindoos and Parsees, who are the best educated, are at the same time amongst the most temperate of the Eastern races. In ancient Rome, on the other hand, the wave of intemperance reached its greatest altitude when the arts were languishing, when her military prestige was waning, and when the barbarians whom she had subdued were becoming in their turn her conquerors. That wave was never broken, but for the time being it helped to wreck the civilisation of a large section of the human race over which it passed. Another smaller wave travelled from Central Asia towards the south-west, and there Islamism was the rock upon which it burst. This is, perhaps, the most conspicuous instance in which religion, aided, however, by the sword, has offered an effective resistance to the spread of drunkenness. The same tide which had submerged the Roman empire rolled on with undiminished force, and nearly overwhelmed the empire of Germany. But there, for the first time, we clearly apprehend the fact that drunkenness does not run side by side with true civilisation, at least if the latter is represented by all that is noble and refined in æsthetic tastes, all that is enlightened in literature, science, and philosophy. For the Germans were the greatest drunkards at the time they were mere fighting men; not, perhaps, when they faced the legions of Germanicus, and certainly not when they stood opposed to those of Napoleon III.; but whilst they were still a nation of uncultivated boors, submissive followers of a band of robber-barons, whose highest conception of human greatness consisted in feats of arms and deeds of chivalry. But with the extension of commerce and intercourse with surrounding peoples came habits of temperance and frugality, in which the nation was soon confirmed by the spread of knowledge, by intellectual culture in the upper classes, and by the education of the great mass of the people. And so, too, it has been in modern Scandinavia, in England, and in the United States of America. In each of those lands the tide of intemperance rose to its highest before the masses began to be educated, and in all three the ebb appears to have set in with greater or less rapidity. So far, then, it would appear, from a careful study of the history of drink and its influence upon the various races and upon the different classes of society, that barbarism and religious credulity are accompanied by immorality and unbridled intemperance, whilst sobriety, virtue, and self-restraint are the concomitants of pure religion, and of the arts of civilisation.