h it the fate of the civilized world,
depended on their exertions. Out of 270,000 men, of whom the citizens of
Rome consisted before the war, no less than seventy thousand were in
arms in its fourth year. No such proportion, has ever since been heard
of in the world. One in a hundred of the whole population is the utmost
which experience has shown a state is capable of bearing, for any length
of time, in her regular army. "As Hannibal," says he, "utterly eclipses
Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even
Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit, and wisdom,
and power of Rome. The senate, which voted its thanks to its political
enemy Varro, 'because he had not despaired of the commonwealth,' and
which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in
any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused to send their
accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than
the conqueror of Zama. Never was the wisdom of God's providence more
manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It
was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered;
his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men
can only act permanently by forming great nations, and no one man, even
though it were Hannibal himself, can, in one generation, effect such a
work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a
great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it;
and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body to which magic
power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has
ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the
battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years
later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead; and
consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to
receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws
and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language
into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that
empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian
Europe."[30]

Such was Hannibal; a man capable by his single capacity of arresting and
all but overturning a nation, destined by Providence for such mighty
achievements, such lasting services to the human race. His combat with
Rome