The circumstantial evidence of the prehistoric antiquities which touch this matter, as well as the slight allusions of historical records in antiquity, indicate unambiguously enough that when the Germanic immigrants moved into the territories of the Fatherland they moved in as invaders, or rather as marauders, and made themselves masters of the people already living on the land.

And history quite as unambiguously declares that when the Fatherland first comes under its light it presents a dark and bloody ground of tumultuous contention and intrigue; where princes and princelings, captains of war and of rapine as well as the captains of superstition, spend the substance of an ignominiously sordid and servile populace in an endless round of mutual raiding, treachery, assassinations and supersession.
Taken at their face value, the recorded stories of that early time would leave one to infer that the common people, whose industry supported this superstructure of sordid mastery, could have survived only by oversight.
But touched as it is with poetic license and devoted to the admirable life of the master class--admirable in their own eyes and in those of their chroniclers, as undoubtedly also in the eyes of the subject populace--the history of that time doubtless plays up the notable exploits and fortunes of its conspicuous personages, somewhat to the neglect of the obscure vicissitudes of life and fortune among that human raw material by use of which the admirable feats of the master class were achieved, and about the use of which the dreary traffic of greed and crime went on among the masters.
Of the later history, what covers, say, the last one thousand years, there is no need to speak at length.

With transient, episodic, interruptions it is for the Fatherland a continuation out of these beginnings, leading out into a more settled system of subjection and mastery and a progressively increased scale of princely enterprise, resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace.

In all this later history the posture of things in the Fatherland is by no means unique, nor is it even strikingly peculiar, by contrast with the rest of western Europe, except in degree.

It is of the same general kind as the rest of what has gone to make the historical advance of medieval and modern times; but it differs from the generality in a more sluggish movement and a more tenacious adherence to what would be rated as the untoward features of mediaevalism.