tion of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
_Paradiso_.[3] Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian. The voluntary or
accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
which it popularized is worth considering. It is false to the genius
of Rome. It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words. _Imperium ac
justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
conceptions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
Rome's name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Freedom, the
freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
statesman! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find. The common
traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on
the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how completely the
ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
Rome!

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