Germans

a promise which the Agrippinians made to the Germans.

The practice of private individuals, exercising punishment, was the origin of single combats, so familiar to the Germans before the introduction of Christianity, and not yet sufficiently laid aside.

This, as we are informed by Tacitus, was a frequent cause of war among the ancient Germans.

What is more spirited than the Germans?

What more eager for arms, among which they are born and reared, whose one care is for arms while they neglect all else?

"That you may know," he says, "that anger has in it something noble, you will see that free nations, which are the most prone to anger, are such as the Germans and Scythians.

It will be remembered that some years ago, when this nation was meekly turning the right cheek to Germany after receiving some sharp slaps on the left, a most unprovoked raid was made by the police on a harmless foreigners' club near Tottenham Court Road;

And the notorious short-sightedness of Germans has been set down to compulsory book-study.

The servile docility of Germans is a standing psychological puzzle.

Primogeniture did not belong to the Customs which the barbarians practised on their first establishment within the Roman Empire.

The more clearly we perceive that, when the Feudal institutions were in process of formation, there was no source in the world whence they could derive their elements but the Roman law of the provincials on the one hand and the archaic customs of the barbarians on the other, the more are we perplexed at first sight by our knowledge that neither Roman nor barbarian was accustomed to give any prefer …

The barbarians were confessedly strangers to any such conception as that of a Will.

8) is so brief as to leave in some obscurity both what the facts were and how Tacitus understood them.

‘We may easily discover that Tacitus indulges an honest pleasure in the contrast of barbarian virtue with the dissolute conduct of the Roman ladies, yet there are some striking circumstances that give an air of truth, or at least of probability, to the conjugal faith and chastity of the Germans.

First, it would be foolish to claim for the Teutonic nations or kindred an exclusive title to any one of the qualities noted by Tacitus.

It was the very state of things which existed when the ancient Hundred Courts of the Germans were administering the rude Salic law.

Again, as we read in Tacitus, the Germans accused the Romans of ‘preventing all intercourse between them and of closing up to them the rivers and roads, and almost the very air of heaven’.

“The princes in Germany were earls in England.

the same power which raised him to honor, humbled and degraded him.

“Kings they (the Germans) respected as the first magistrates of the state;

In whom have the nations believed — the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, and those who dwell in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and those who inhabit Pontus and Asia and Pamphylia, those who reside in Egypt, and those who inhabit the region of Africa beyond Cyrene, Romans and resident foreigners, and then the Jews in Jerusalem, and the other nations — as now the various tribes of the …