It is far more instructive and suggestive than a chronicle. Nowhere have the purposes of the law been more ably stated than in its terse and expressive phraseology. It proclaims the sentiments of a lofty morality. It appreciates the true object and end of legislation. In its stern and inflexible disregard for the arrogant claims of superior wealth and station, it assured to the most lowly the administration of impartial justice. The Goths, a branch of the Indo-Germanic race, from which the Caucasian of modern times is descended, and whose habitat once extended from Western Europe to the great plains of Central Asia, seem to have wandered farther, and to have changed more materially, as regards their laws, customs, and religious belief, than other tribes of migratory barbarians. Distinct from the Germans, or Teutons, they have, nevertheless, often been confounded with them; a fact due to their nomadic tendencies, personal appearance, and general habits of life. The similarity which characterized the vast hordes, or vagrant multitudes, which issued in ancient times from the _officina gentium_, has been the cause of much confusion in the more or less fanciful accounts of classic annalists and historians. The coincidence of numerous terms of the Gothic language with those of Sanscrit, and the identity of many roots of words in both languages, have established the origin of the Goths to be Indian, and not Scandinavian, as was once generally supposed. It is related by Herodotus, that Darius, a thousand years before Christ, repelled from the confines of the Persian dominions, across the Danube, a great migration of barbarians, moving and living on horses and in chariots. This people, known as Scythians in antiquity, were the ancestors of the modern Slavs, and kindred of the Goths. Driven back by the Persians, they, with others who followed them, distributed themselves over Northern Europe, whence, in time, they descended to overwhelm, with their numbers and their valor, the decadent and tottering Roman Empire. The original Goths were typical savages. They had practically no political organization; dressed in skins; disdained all labor; showed no mercy to their enemies; killed their parents, when they became old and infirm; had few religious ideas; worshiped a drawn sword as a divinity; were filthy in their personal habits; and recognized only the law of the strongest. From such unpromising progenitors was derived the race destined to be, in large measure, the lawgivers of Europe.