The Barbarians.
It is surprising to the judicious what can be the effect of a word or phrase. Probably the term “barbarian” has caused as much confusion in the minds of young students of history as any other term. It signifies to him at least a semi-savage. Yet we know that to the Greek it meant only a non-Hellene. In the later Roman times it meant Goth or German. And yet, long before these people finally disrupted the Western Empire, they had ceased to be barbarian in any common conception of the term. If we substitute for the word migration the longer word immigration, it will give a better idea of their earlier comings, to which allusion has already been made. Humbler neighbors from without the pale, they slowly crept into the southern space and glow out of their crowded and unlovely north. With no ideas of conquest at first, but seeking betterment for themselves, as to-day come the peoples from the same Russia; or, pressed out of their own hunting grounds by the atrocious Hun, they poured steadily in. And long before they became a menace, most of them had become at least half civilized by contact with the finer south. Their men had many of them served in the Roman legions. And Christianity had early made way among them. And at length, when the weakness of the West made it an easy prey to their greater vigor, it was not as bands of whooping savages falling upon a peaceful white settlement that they came, but they simply took up the scepter of destiny which nerveless and unworthy hands had let fall. Emerton’s “Introduction to the Middle Ages,” and the early chapters of Adams’ “Civilization during the Middle Ages,” furnish the best of reading for topics like these just suggested.