en the Phoenician ideal and our own; the second
was the solidarity of the Western blood.

The army which Hannibal led recognized the voice of a Carthaginian
genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was
paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or
her colonies must receive a wage, must be "volunteer"; and
meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in
Africa was a trading policy. Rome "interfered with business"; on
this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her
was made.

The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit:
an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied
and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a
sister.

The Italian confederation was true because it rested on other than
economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived
every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the
delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger
for defeat.

It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr.
Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a
belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all
subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work
of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary
habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a
perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the
centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The
perception of this very simple fact has not come to many of our
historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first
sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each
course of lectures with it.

The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly
clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and
that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more
directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of
earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development
of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive
influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say,
the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of