cess for a time
and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its
permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the
civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again
because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived
internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what
still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized
world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman
Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I
trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse the
causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be
out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who
administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to
the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the
enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of
that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they
did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I
do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as
by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or
semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the
range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now
suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to
say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they
erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the
way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the
ideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea of
nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a
single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon
a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered
upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs
of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere
tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of
Europe based upon it collapsed.

The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it,
and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to
the reorgani