d that object, but, as a rule, it has
ended in their own absorption. The motives of the Roman Empire were
strangely mixed. Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later
times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great
incentives. The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen
like Sulla or Caesar were among the aims of many conquests. The
extension of religion had little to do with it, for the Romans had the
decency to keep their gods to themselves and never slaughtered in the
name of Jove. But they were compelled to Empire by a peculiar conviction
of destiny. They did not destroy or subdue other peoples so much for
glory as from a sense of duty. It was their Heaven-sent mission to
rule. Their poet advised other nations to occupy themselves with wisdom,
learning, statuary, the arts, or what other trivialities they pleased;
it was the Roman's task to hold the world in sway. To the Roman the
object of Empire was Empire. It seemed to him the natural thing to
conquer every other nation, making the world one Rome. That was, in
fact, his true religion, and we can but congratulate him on the unshaken
faith of his self-esteem. The Turk, on the other hand, who was the next
Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws
or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who
accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete
equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent
conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They
depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying
actual possession of another country and all its population. There was
always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir
against that heir, as though the destinies of nationality could be
settled by a strip of parchment or a love-affair with a princess. People
grew so accustomed to this folly that even now we hardly realise its
absurdity. Yet I suppose if the King of Spain left his kingdom by will
to his well-beloved cousin George of England, not an English wherry
would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark
that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the
Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a
prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated
royal dynasties from the motives of conquest.

In the extensi