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A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 247

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 ex-
panded 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 pro-
tracted 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 Moinm-
sen, "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