of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning
of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public
power, public order, and public intelligence.

He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western
races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very
clearly in _Esto Perpetua_, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers,
as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our
own kind." We can trace it again inversely in _The Path to Rome_, in
such a passage as this:

Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern,
exterior and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a
distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give
me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they
had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to
create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little
effort.

It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the
greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one
objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in
Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr.
Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to
make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.

It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed,
that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that
inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any,
he has not yet explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used
to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward
with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk
with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that
rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may
give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his
conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first
discovered it and gave it expression.

Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western
race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp
example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He
sets it out in _Esto Perpetua_:

It [the Phoenician attempt] failed for two reasons: the first was
the contrast betwe