f he ever feels, any movement of aversion to
mankind outside his own race. But it is not necessary to hate Carthage
in order to admit that it was well for mankind that Rome triumphed;
and we at this day, and men to all time, may be thankful that a few
decades after the Punic Wars the genius of Caesar so expanded the
bounds of the dominions of Rome, so extended, settled, and solidified
the outworks of her civilization and polity, that when the fated day
came that her power in turn should reel under the shock of conquest,
with which she had remodelled the world, and she should go down
herself, the time of the final fall was protracted for centuries by
these exterior defences. They who began the assault as barbarians
entered upon the imperial heritage no longer aliens and foreigners,
but impregnated already with the best of Roman ideas, converts to
Roman law and to Christian faith.

"When the course of history," says Mommsen, "turns from the miserable
monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the
Senate House and in the streets of Rome, we may be allowed--on the
threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day
influence the destinies of the world--to look round us for a moment,
and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is
now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants
of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with
the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic
people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Caesar was not the most
important result of that grand enterprise,--far more momentous than
the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that
if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some
generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called,
would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would
have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become
naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain.
Inasmuch as Caesar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the
rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world, inasmuch as with firm
hand he established the new system of aggressive defence down even to
its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by
rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian
tribes along the frontier with the view of warding