Page 267 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

248 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

indicate the point of view under which the con-
quest of what is now France by the Romans,
and their first contact with the inhabitants of
Germany and of Great Britain, are to be re-
garded in connection with the general history
of the world. . . . The fact that the great Cel-
tic 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 civili-
zation 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 em-
pire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize
the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier