proportional to the intimacy of the contact, or rather to the readiness with which they endeavor to conform themselves to the manners of their new neighbors. Here is an important point. There is no mysterious influence, no "blight," caused by civilization. There is much loose talk about barbarians "melting away" before the light of progress. It may do for the poet to speak of the withering breath of civilization as blasting the child of Nature, but the real cause of the depressing effect of our civilization upon the savage lies in himself, and in his sudden attempt to assimilate what is foreign to the whole tenor of his personal habits, confirmed as they are by centuries of inherited experience. The instances, plentiful enough, of race-decay following civilization, are all in peoples in whom circumstances have led to a sudden and unnatural conformity with the manners of a stronger and more advanced nation. This has occurred generally where the savages have been brought in contact either with a conquering people or with missionaries, the latter cause operating for the most part only when the barbarous tribe was small and the Christianizing influence therefore especially strong, as in the Sandwich Islands. In one notable case the method of contact has been by the barbarians themselves becoming conquerors. Let us examine this latter instance first. The earliest authentic historical record of the Goths as a people shows them in the latter half of the third century living north of the Danube. For a hundred years they had very little connection with any more civilized nation. Then, on the appearance of the Huns in 376, a part of the nation (later to be known as the Visigoths) advanced south of the Danube, the eastern division of the tribe, or Ostrogoths, remaining on the northern side of the river, and mingling with the invading Huns. The latter portion, therefore, were not brought into connection with either branch of the Roman Empire, while the western Goths, gradually adopting a form of the Christian faith, and being enlisted in the Roman armies, were slowly being acted upon by southern civilization. Of course, the effect of the change was much less marked than that of the contact of barbarism with modern civilization; still, undoubtedly, a considerable modification of the character and customs of the western Goths was made, and it occurred gradually enough to diminish its shock. For many years they fought, alternately under and against the eagles, and when finally, under Alaric, their power became supreme in Italy, early in the fifth century, they retired into Gaul very soon after the first sack of Rome. Afterward, though they joined with the Italians against the combined forces of the Huns and Ostrogoths, yet their association was mostly with the provincial representatives of the Roman civilization, and they gradually assumed their permanent position in Aquitania and Spain, where they left their impress as a constituent part of the Provence nation.[1]
In marked contrast with this was the contact of the Ostrogoths
- ↑ Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chapter xxxi, et seq.
