Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. "Vice is not treated by the Germans" (German, the etymologists say, is composed of Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, "as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime "to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of children and destroying the rest."
The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic civilization. "No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people, they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound of their arms," continues our author.
The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon, lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: "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."
Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion; Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should be admitted to citizenship, "Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious words that have come from this man's mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a senator, as a consul?" Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors; and their descendants rule the world.
It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck; in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes, or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a Lee.