true to this high ideal. Faced with the
temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental
monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained
faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not
have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow
State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their
neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First
Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism
slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly
needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built
up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it
did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social
sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and
from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in
its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty.
Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of
responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose
efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the
heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit
of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into
the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and
unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable
sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than
death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of
bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of
civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.

Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone
remained upright--the Christian Church with its organization for
ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion
of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence
of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis
of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was
reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on
the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the
time when mankind should be united under one government and that
government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal
seemed i