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50 wore small swords in St Stephen's Chapel; and the Teutonic legislators sat on their benches of turf armed. "Silence," we are told, was proclaimed by the priests, who, like "Mr Speaker," did not take part in the debate, but had the right of keeping order. "The king or the chief, according to age, birth, distinction in war or eloquence, is heard more because he has influence to persuade than because he has power to command." Murmurs indicated the 'Noes,' brandishing of spears the 'Ayes,' in this primitive Parliament. Of their skill in husbandry Tacitus has little favourable to say. The vine was yet to be introduced into Rhineland, fruit-trees were rarely if ever planted, and there was a plausible excuse for the omission of orchards. In the first place, the German was a migratory animal; in the next, a fighting one. In either case a stranger or a foe would very likely have been the better for what he had not himself planted or grafted. For cereals the soil generally was too stiff, too sandy, or too wet: to drain the swamps, to irrigate the sand, demanded labour and cost, and the German was too indolent, too poor, and too restless, to undertake anything beyond the rudest agricultural work. He succeeded better as a grazier,—he often owned vast herds of cattle; but here again the farmer of the south far surpassed him, for his domestic kine were small in size and rough in coat, as inferior to the white breed of Umbria, or the herds that were pastured in the Abruzzi during the summer, and in Apulia during the winter months, as a German boat was to a Roman galley. The horses, like the Cossack ponies, were hardy and capable of enduring long journeys, but shaggy and low of stature. The Batavians alone among the northern nations had