off the more
remote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's
country, he gained for the Hellenic-Italian culture the interval
necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the
East.... Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had
not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried
Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that
Caesar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had
laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It
was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those
expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military
point of view, and so barren of immediate result.... That there is a
bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder
fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic
Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a
very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer
and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive
to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden,--all
this is the work of Caesar."

History at times reveals her foresight concrete in the action of a
great individuality like Caesar's. More often her profounder movements
proceed from impulses whose origin and motives cannot be traced,
although a succession of steps may be discerned and their results
stated. A few names, for instance, emerge amid the obscure movements
of the peoples which precipitated the outer peoples upon the Roman
Empire, but, with rare exceptions, they are simply exponents, pushed
forward and upward by the torrent; at the utmost guides, not
controllers, of those whom they represent but do not govern. It is
much the same now. The peoples of European civilization, after a
period of comparative repose, are again advancing all along the line,
to occupy not only the desert places of the earth, but the debatable
grounds, the buffer territories, which hitherto have separated them
from those ancient nations, with whom they now soon must stand face to
face and border to border. But who will say that this vast general
movement represents the thought, even the unconscious thought, of any
one man, as Caesar, or of any few men? To whatever cause we may assign
it, whether to the simple conception of a personal Divine Monarchy
that shapes our ends, or to more