We have already seen that the civilization of a composite people does not include all its social classes.[131] The racial influences that were at work in the lower strata from the first still go on; and they prevent the directing forces of the national culture from reaching the depths at all,—if they do, their action is weak and transitory. In France, about five-eighths of the total population play merely an unwilling and passive part in the development of modern European culture, and that only by fits and starts. With the exception of Great Britain, of which the insular position produces a greater unity of type, the proportion is even higher in the rest of the Continent. I will speak of France at greater length, as an instance of the exact correspondence between language and racial type; for in France we have a particular instance that strikingly confirms our main thesis. We know little, or rather we have no real evidence at all, of the phases which Celtic and rustic Latin[132] passed through before they met and coalesced. Nevertheless, St. Jerome and his contemporary Sulpicius Severus tell us (the former in his “Commentaries” on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, the second in his “Dialogue on the virtues of the Eastern Monks”) that in their time at least two languages were generally spoken in Gaul. There was, first, Celtic, which was preserved on the banks of the Rhine in so pure a form, that it remained identical with the language spoken by the Galatians of Asia Minor, who had been separated from their mother country for more than six centuries.[133] Secondly, there was the language called “Gallic,” which according to a commentator, can only have been a form, already broken down, of Popular Latin. This fourth century dialect, while different from the Gallic of Treves, was spoken neither in the West nor in Aquitaine. It was found only in the centre and south of what is now France, and was itself probably split up into two great divisions. It is the common source of the currents, more or less Latinized, which were mingled with other elements in different proportions, and formed later the _langue d’oil_ and the _lingua romana_, in the narrower sense. I will speak first of the latter.