This is what occurred, for
instance, in Western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and,
later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the
modern countries of Western Europe are descended from the states
created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be
called "new" or "young" states in the sense that part or all of the
people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not
been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on the
career of civilized communities. In the southern part of Western
Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants
already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the
new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had
come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities
with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors;
though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there
was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which
gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same
races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a
slowly changing barbarism.
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