While Caesar thus showed to the conquered nation every allowable consideration and spared their national, political, and religious institutions as far as was at all compatible with their subjection to Rome, he did so, not as renouncing the fundamental idea of his conquest, the Romanization of Gaul, but with a view to realize it in the most indulgent way. He did not content himself with letting the same circumstances, which had already in great part Romanized the south province, produce their effect likewise in the north; but, like a genuine statesman, he sought to stimulate the natural course of development and, moreover, to shorten as far as possible the always painful period of transition. To say nothing of the admission of a number of Celts of rank into Roman citizenship and even of several perhaps into the Roman senate, it was probably Caesar who introduced, although with certain restrictions, the Latin instead of the native tongue as the official language within the several cantons in Gaul, and who introduced the Roman instead of the national monetary system on the footing of reserving the coinage of gold and of denarii to the Roman authorities, while the smaller money was to be coined by the several cantons, but only for circulation within the cantonal bounds, and this too in accordance with the Roman standard. We may smile at the Latin jargon, which the dwellers by the Loire and the Seine henceforth employed in accordance with orders[52]; but these barbarisms were pregnant with a greater future than the correct Latin of the capital.

Perhaps too, if the cantonal constitution in Gaul afterwards appears more closely approximated to the Italian urban constitution, and the chief places of the canton as well as the common councils attain a more marked prominence in it than was probably the case in the original Celtic organization, the change may be referred to Caesar. No one probably felt more than the political heir of Gaius Gracchus and of Marius, how desirable in a military as well as in a political point of view it would have been to establish a series of Transalpine colonies as bases of support for the new rule and starting-points of the new civilization. If nevertheless he confined himself to the settlement of his Celtic or German horsemen in Noviodunum[53] and to that of the Boii in the canton of the Haedui[54] - which latter settlement already rendered quite the services of a Roman colony in the war with Vercingetorix[55] - the reason was merely that his farther plans did not permit him to put the plough instead of the sword into the hands of his legions. What he did in later years for the old Roman province in this respect, will be explained in its own place; it is probable that the want of time alone prevented him from extending the same system to the regions which he had recently subdued.

All was over with the Celtic nation. Its political dissolution had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun and in course of regular progress. This was no accidental destruction, such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically necessary catastrophe. The very course of the last war proves this, whether we view it as a whole or in detail. When the establishment of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts - mostly, moreover, German or half-German - offered energetic resistance. When the foreign rule was actually established, the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus. 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.

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.