And in the meantime Rome had begun to disseminate its heritage over Europe. Its legions poured over Spain and Gaul and Germany and Britain. Its administrators and judges and teachers followed the eagles, and set up schools and law-courts and theatres and baths and temples. It flung broad roads to the north of Britain and the banks of the Rhine and Danube. Under the shelter of the "Roman Peace" the peoples of Europe could spare men from the plough and the sword for the cultivation of art and letters. The civilisations of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, North Africa, and Italy were ushered into the calendar of mankind, and were ready to bear the burden when the mighty city on the Tiber let the sceptre fall from its enfeebled hands. Rome fell. The more accurate historians of our time correct the old legend of death from senile decay or from the effect of dissipation. Races of men, like races of animals, do not die; they are killed. The physical deterioration of the citizens of Rome was a small matter in its fall. Fiscal and imperial blunders loosed the frame of its empire. The resources were still there, but there was none to organise and unify them. The imperial system--or chaos--ruined Rome. And just when the demoralisation was greatest, and the Teutonic tribes at the frontiers were most numerous and powerful, an accident shook the system. A fierce and numerous people from Asia, the Huns, wandered into Europe, threw themselves on the Teutonic tribes, and precipitated these tribes upon the Empire. A Diocletian might still have saved the Empire, but there was none to guide it. The northern barbarians trod its civilisation underfoot, and Europe passed into the Dark Ages. One more application of the evolutionary principle, and we close the story. The "barbarians"--the Goths and Vandals and their Germanic cousins--were barbaric only in comparison with the art and letters of Rome. They had law, polity, and ideals. European civilisation owes elements to them, as well as to Rome. To say simply that the barbarians destroyed the institutions of Rome is no adequate explanation of the Dark Ages. Let us see rather how the Dark Ages were enlightened.