In his study of the Dark Ages, Mr. Dawson has done a difficult thing with entire success. What is nearly as interesting is the apparently effortless way in which he has achieved his end. Instead of as a formless waste of barbarism and decay, such as is often presented by the merely secular historian, the Dark Ages are viewed as the essentially formative period of European history, when the foundations were being slowly and painfully laid. Though superficially the period lacks the attractions of what are usually considered the great epochs of history, yet the age that saw the laying of great foundations of European culture has an interest that is all its own. Foundation-stones, if less showy, are more necessary than flying buttresses.

The political existence of Europe depends on the Roman Empire; it has little, if any, geographical warrant. A society of city states, the inheritors of the Hellenistic culture, was welded together by the military dictatorship of the Roman tradition. It is no mere figure of speech to call Caesar and Augustus the founders of the European polity, for the barbarians, though possessed of valuable cultural traditions, were of themselves incapable of producing a higher civilisation. It was Rome with her genius for constructive and sustained toil which was to bring this to pass. Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.