s good--that a very efficient and energetic
government was created. The government of an oligarchy makes sometimes
a very rich and powerful state, but a discontented and unhappy people.

Let the reader now turn to the map and find the place of Carthage upon
it. Let him imagine a great and rich city there, with piers, and
docks, and extensive warehouses for the commerce, and temples, and
public edifices of splendid architecture, for the religious and civil
service of the state, and elegant mansions and palaces for the
wealthy aristocracy, and walls and towers for the defense of the
whole. Let him then imagine a back country, extending for some hundred
miles into the interior of Africa, fertile and highly cultivated,
producing great stores of corn, and wine, and rich fruits of every
description. Let him then look at the islands of Sicily, of Corsica,
and Sardinia, and the Baleares, and conceive of them as rich and
prosperous countries, and all under the Carthaginian rule. Look, also,
at the coast of Spain; see, in imagination, the city of Carthagena,
with its fortifications, and its army, and the gold and silver mines,
with thousands and thousands of slaves toiling in them. Imagine fleets
of ships going continually along the shores of the Mediterranean, from
country to country, cruising back and forth to Tyre, to Cyprus, to
Egypt, to Sicily, to Spain, carrying corn, and flax, and purple dyes,
and spices, and perfumes, and precious stones, and ropes and sails for
ships, and gold and silver, and then periodically returning to
Carthage, to add the profits they had made to the vast treasures of
wealth already accumulated there. Let the reader imagine all this with
the map before him, so as to have a distinct conception of the
geographical relations of the localities, and he will have a pretty
correct idea of the Carthaginian power at the time it commenced its
dreadful conflicts with Rome.

Rome itself was very differently situated. Rome had been built by some
wanderers from Troy, and it grew, for a long time, silently and
slowly, by a sort of internal principle of life and energy. One region
after another of the Italian peninsula was merged in the Roman state.
They formed a population which was, in the main, stationary and
agricultural. They tilled the fields; they hunted the wild beasts;
they raised great flocks and herds. They seem to have been a race--a
sort of variety of the human species--possessed of a very refined and