those of the American Indians as described by observers, and he found the resemblance so close that the "philologists of the last century, who, with more erudition than science, endeavored to trace the migrations of various nations, and who were apt, upon the slightest appearance of resemblance, to find an affinity between nations far removed from each other, and to conclude that they were descended from the same ancestors, would hardly have failed, on viewing such an amazing similarity, to pronounce with confidence, that the Germans and Americans must be the same people.'"

Robertson himself thought that the resemblance was accounted for by the fact "that the characters of nations depend on the state of society in which they live, and on the political institutions established among them; and the human mind, whenever it is placed in the same situation, will, in ages the most distant and in countries the most remote, assume the same form, and be distinguished by the same manners." The notion that primitive Teutonic polity survives in any of the institutions of modern Europe received no support from Robertson.

The historians of the eighteenth century agreed in attributing the feudal system to the characteristics of the Teutonic tribes that invaded the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly Gibbon

had this in mind in remarking: "The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners." Later on in the same chapter he ridiculed the antiquarian fables which credited the ancient Germans with stores of traditional knowledge of art and science, remarking that "the Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters, and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection." As a matter of historic fact the ancient Germans "passed their lives in a state of ignorance and poverty, which it has pleased some declaimers to dignify with the appellation of virtuous simplicity." Their assemblies he described as scenes of violence and disorder. "For the Germans always met in arms, and it was constantly to be dreaded, lest an irregular multitude inflamed with faction and strong liquors, should use those arms to enforce, as well as to declare, their furious resolves. We may recollect how often the diets of Poland have been polluted with blood, and the more numerous party has been compelled to yield to the

1 Vol. I of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: chap. IX, on "The State of Germany till the Invasion of the Barbarians in the Time of the Emperor Decius."

more violent and seditious." In a note Gibbon remarked: "Even in our (Anglo-Saxon) ancient parliament the barons often carried a question, not so much by the number of votes, as by that of their armed followers."

Gibbon recorded his agreement with Robertson and Hume in the opinion that the population of Germany was much magnified by ancient writers, impressed by the swarms of ferocious warriors from time to time descending upon the empire. He thought that in the great area of ancient Germany there might have been possibly a million warriors, but they were distributed among more than forty independent states. Gibbon summed up the case with these observations:

"Modern nations are fixed and permanent societies connected among themselves by laws and government, bound to their native soil by arts and agriculture. The German tribes were voluntary and fluctuating associations of soldiers, almost of savages. The same territory often changed its inhabitants in the tide of conquest and emigration. The same communities, uniting in a plan of defense or invasion, bestowed a new title on their new confederacy. The dissolution of an ancient confederacy, restored to the independent tribes their peculiar but long forgotten appellation. A victorious state often communicated its own name to a vanquished people. Sometimes crowds of volunteers flocked from all parts to the standard of a favorite

leader; his camp became their country, and some circumstance of the enterprise soon gave a common denomination to the mixed multitude. The distinctions of the ferocious invaders were perpetually varied by themselves, and confounded the astonished subjects of the Roman empire."

In general it may be said that the great historians of the eighteenth century agreed in the opinion that what the countries of Europe derived from the Teutonic invasions was a military constitution of society, perpetual in its violence, unstable in its character, and miserable in its results. Law and order were established, art and industry were promoted, and civilization was introduced, by the gradual suppression of primitive Teutonic polity, through the consolidation of royal authority. Of representative government as a distinct form of polity the eighteenth century historians had no notion whatever. The representative element in the constitution of England they regarded simply as an incident of royal administration in that country.

CHAPTER IV

INCEPTION OF THE TEUTONIC

THEORY

THE earliest mention of this theory appears to be that made by Montesquieu in his rambling work on politics, jurisprudence and ethics, The Spirit of the Laws (1748). It is a passing allusion, as follows:

"In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus, 'On the Manners of the Germans,' we find it is from that nation the English have borrowed the idea of their political government. This beautiful system was invented first in the woods." 1

That is all. He threw out the idea but he made no attempt to explain it or develop it. It was not at all in accord with the historical

1 Book XI., chapter VI. It was probably due more to the idealizing of primitive conditions which Rousseau made fashionable than to the direct influence of Montesquieu that an echo of the Teutonic theory was heard across the Atlantic. According to a letter from John Adams to his wife, August 14, 1776, Thomas Jefferson proposed as a device for the great seal of the United States, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs, from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed." Jefferson's idea did not meet with a sympathetic response. The American situation at that time was not propitious to romantic views about government.