The sieges and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character.

Every page of Celtic history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage before its presence.

In the mighty vortex of the world's history, which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically superior nationality.

On the eve of parting from this remarkable nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact, that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles, of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news-- and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts, for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates; the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political discipline.

It is, and remains, at all times and all places the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive, credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view-- thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always and everywhere the same.
The Beginnings of Romanic Development But the fact that this great people was ruined by the Transalpine wars of Caesar, was not the most important result of that grand enterprise; far more momentous than the negative was the positive result.
It hardly admits of a doubt that, if the rule of the senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and Spain.