mendous fortification, and the King of Italy today,
driving through the streets in his carriage, may look upon the wall of
the King who reigned in Rome more than two thousand and four hundred
years ago.

Under those six rulers, from Romulus to Servius, from the man of the
River Village to the man of walls, Rome had grown from a sheepfold to a
town, from a town to a walled city, from a city to a little nation,
matched against all mankind, to win or die, inch by inch, sword in hand.
She was a kingdom now, and her men were subjects; and still the third
law of great races was strong and waking. Romans obeyed their leader so
long as he could lead them well--no longer. The twilight of the Kings
gathered suddenly, and their names were darkened, and their sun went
down in shame and hate. In the confusion, tragic legend rises to tell
the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history,
turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals
upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my
hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of
unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her
husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed
done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the
Republic was born. While father, husband and friend were stunned with
grief, Brutus held up the dripping knife before their eyes. 'By this
most chaste blood, I swear--Gods be my witnesses--that I will hunt down
Tarquin the Proud, himself, his infamous wife and every child of his,
with fire and sword, and with all my might, and neither he nor any other
man shall ever again be King in Rome.' So they all swore, and bore the
dead woman out into the market-place, and called on all men to stand by
them.

They kept their word, and the tale tells how the Tarquins were driven
out to a perpetual exile, and by and by allied themselves with Porsena,
and marched on Rome, and were stopped only at the Sublician bridge by
brave Horatius.

Chaos next. Then all at once the Republic stands out, born full grown
and ready armed, stern, organized and grasping, but having already
within itself the quickened opposites that were to fight for power so
long and so fiercely,--the rich and the poor, the patrician and the
plebeian, the might and the right.

There is a wonder in that quick change from Kingdom to Commonwealth,
which nothing can