Lectures and Essays | Page 8

received a population of fugitives like the islands of Venice. The city may have drawn part of its population and some of its political elements from this source. In this sense the story of the Asylum may possibly represent a fact, though it has itself nothing to do with history.
Then, as to imperial organization and government. Superiority in these would naturally flow from superiority in civilization, and in previous political training, the first of which Rome derived from her comparative wealth and from the mental characteristics of a city population; the second she derived from the long struggle through which the rights of the plebeians were equalized with those of the patricians, and which again must have had its ultimate origin in geographical circumstance bringing together different elements of population. Cromwell was a politician and a religious leader before he was a soldier; Napoleon was a soldier before he was a politician: to this difference between the moulds in which their characters were cast may be traced, in great measure, the difference of their conduct when in power, Cromwell devoting himself to political and ecclesiastical reform, while Napoleon used his supremacy chiefly as the means of gratifying his lust for war. There is something analogous in the case of imperial nations. Had the Roman, when he conquered the world been like the Ottoman, like the Ottoman he would probably have remained. His thirst for blood slaked, he would simply have proceeded to gratify his other animal lusts; he would have destroyed or consumed everything, produced nothing, delivered over the world to a plundering anarchy of rapacious satraps, and when his sensuality had overpowered his ferocity, he would have fallen in his turn before some horde whose ferocity was fresh, and the round of war and havoc would have commenced again. The Roman destroyed and consumed a good deal; but he also produced not a little: he produced, among other things, first in Italy, then in the world at large, the Peace of Rome indispensable to civilization, and destined to be the germ and precursor of the Peace of Humanity.
In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians, with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the future masters of the world. How different was this education from that of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business- like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.
In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire, propugnacula imperii. Political depletion and provision for needy citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at