European civilization is not a material spread out evenly from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic and from the Frozen Sea to the Mediterranean; it is an influence whose gen eral expression• is Roman, whose permanent seat is within the old boundaries of the Roman Empire, and which while it has radiated east ward and northward of those boundaries through the influence of the Christian mission aries, loses its intensity as a general rule the further it proceeds from its original seat.
This Roman unity was broken by the Adri atic into two halves, originally widely differing and as the centuries proceeded differing yet more widely. In the eastern half (the Balkan Peninsula, Egypt and the Levant and Asia Minor) old and stable civilizations had ac cepted the hegemony of Rome. The language of the generality of men was Greek, their in terests were those of a very aged and per haps a somewhat exhausted civilization, whose origins went back to the remotest eras, and whose high art and exquisite literature was already in perfection in epochs long anterior to the furtherest records of history.
In the West, Latin was the general tongtie, though for long the educated and wealthier classes were bilingual. And there the •Roman genius taught and produced a new civilization common to the Iberian, the Gaul and the Briton, to the Kabyle of the Atlas Mountains, and to the German of the Rhine Valley, intro ducing to all these people a common art, a common tongue and law, and a common hap piness. The boundaries of this Latin unity are very clearly determined: A line drawn from Glasgow to Edinburgh including both those cities shows us what part of the British Islands enjoyed this benefit, Wales, the Lowlands and England. The Netherlands, south of the Rhine delta, all the lower left bank of the Rhine and in its upper reaches both banks — all the valley of the upper Danube and the mountains of the Tyrol. All North Africa, from the Bight of Tunis to Tangiers; all Spain and all Gaul— had in common the vine, the mass, the arch, the column, the municipium, the military way, and were one thing.
Now if this boundary be drawn upon the map it will at once be perceived that Gaul was the centre of gravity, so far as mere area was concerned, of the whole system. And to this mere material fact, important though it was, there was soon added a series of historical ac cidents which very greatly emphasized this cen tral position.
In the same period which saw the flowering of Roman thought into a definitely Catholic civilization, the long transformation of the Ro man army was accomplished. It had become an hereditary and a mercenary thing, drawn largely from those populations which did not enjoy the full civilization of Rome and which were therefore ready to accept a wage more easily than would the free citizen of the em pire. Through the agency of these armies, in a most confused manner, the barbarian pressed more and more upon the civilized area, and he pressed upon it, though never in large numbers yet always with an energy that varied from an infiltration like that of the Franks or the Bur gundians to a savage incursion like that of the pirates who overran the eastern part of Britain.
A little later than the first series of these catastrophes the Mohammedan religion sud denly united the non-Roman desert tribes to the south and these destroyed the civilization of northern Africa which had already been weakened by an anarchy of wandering Ger mans, revolted slaves and what not, and, finally, by the 8th century the principal islands of the western Mediterranean, nearly all the Iberian and the ports of southern Italy were occupied by the Saracens.
The test of Roman, that is of civilized, con tinuity, is the authority of the town, with its bishop as the successor (he had once been the coadjutor) of the civil authority. And side by side with this test is a secondary one, namely, the authority of the Palatine Writ: of the Writ issued in Latin from the palace (a word borrowed from the Palatine Hill at Rome) wherein resided the centre of government. Now if we take a map of western Europe as de fined within the old Roman limits,. and shade with a pencil those Roman municipal areas which lost such a continuity of episcopal gov ernment and Palatine, Latin, authority, we shall find that this shading will leave us nothing but northern Italy and Gaul; and indeed, but for the exception which northern Italy pre sents, the vast area of Gaul may properly be regarded as the only survival of Roman civili zation in the West. From this survival, as from an unsubmerged rock in a flood, a plat form could be made upon which the damaged conditions of civilization might be rebuilt and from which the influence of civilization could again radiate.