he political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own
eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.

Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
But disaster taught Spain nothing--

[Illustration: Greek text]

Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune
A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.

The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
comment than the decline of Spain.[4]

The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
before by Leo III and Charlemagne.

And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
Revolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."

From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new
empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
moulded by a new ideal.

Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
what each brings to the vanquished.

Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
behind division advances through the passes and across the plains o