meant the extension of their empire. This was their sole standard of morality. They had no notion of any higher duty to God and his eternal laws of justice, mercy, and beneficence. This observation applies even to those Romans whose standard of morality was highest. Thus Tacitus,* describing the massacre of the Marsi by Germanicus, says: "The country for fifty miles was wasted with fire and sword. Neither age nor sex was spared." And yet he extols the clemency of Germanicus, in the parallel between him and Alexander. And,† as if it were a fine stroke of statesmanship, he describes the policy of Agricola in Britain as directed to teach the Britons far worse vices than those of their former savage life. These were men of distinguished ancient virtue. Again, Tacitus‡ thus describes the slaughter in the victory gained by Suetonius Paulinus over the Britons under Boadicea: "The soldiers did not abstain from the slaughter of the women. The cattle

* Ann. i. 51.

† Agric. 21.

Ann. xiv. 37. The Athenian principles of public morals were precisely the same. The argument put by Thucydides into the mouth of Euphemus, ἀνδρὶ δὲ τυράννῳ, ἤ πόλει ἀρχὴν ἐχούσῃ, οὐδὲν ἄλογον, ὃ, τι ξυμφέρον (Thuc. vi. 85),—and of the Athenian ambassadors to the Melians:ἡγούμεθα γὰρ τό τε θεῖον δόξῃ, τὸ ἀνθρώπειόν τε σαφῶς διαπαντὸς ὑπὸ φύσεως ἀναγκαίας, οὗ ἄν κρατῇ, aρxε (Thuc. v. 105),—is in accordance with the whole of at least their later history. Adam Smith concludes that the morals of the Romans, both in public and private life, were, upon the whole, superior to those of the Greeks. But without going into minute distinctions, it may be concluded that both were bad.

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added to the heaps of slain. The glory of the day was equal to the most splendid victories of ancient times." "According to some writers, not less than eighty thousand Britons," including, it may be inferred, women and children, were put to the sword.” Again, Tacitus* describes their treatment of their subjects in language that cannot be translated. Vitellius ordered new levies to be made, and the youth of Batavia were to be called out. By the avarice and profligacy of the Roman officers, the aged and infirm were pressed into the service, in order to extort from them large sums for their dismission; and boys of tender years, but advanced in their growth (as was generally the case in that country), ad stuprum trahebantur.

Far as some of the modern imitators of these oppressors and corrupters of the ancient world have gone, none have come quite up to their model; which, in the later stages, presented such a fermentation of vice and crime; of cruelty, sensuality, and unnaturai passions; of universal dissolution of all the ties of humanity, morality, and religion, as the world has surely never elsewhere seen. The effect of the Roman policy in thoroughly brutalizing the Roman populace, and, indeed, the whole people, is described by Tacitus. In the conflict in the streets of Rome between the soldiers of Vitellius and Vespasian, the † Ibid. iii. 83.

*Hist. iv. 14.

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populace cheered the combatants with shouts and theatrical applause. If the men fled from their ranks and took shelter in shops or houses, they roared to have them dragged forth and put to death, like gladiators, for their diversion. While the soldiers were intent on slaughter, they were employed in plundering. Truly, such a people deserved all the sufferings they endured from their tyrants-instruments of the vengeance of Heaven-when the spirit of cruelty and brutality which those oppressors and robbers of the ancient world had so long exercised in other nations was turned against themselves. On this occasion Rome presented a medley of savage slaughter and monstrous vice: in one place, war and desolation; in another, bathing, riot, and debauchery.

Even without any sympathy for the general success of Carthage, it is difficult, in reading the campaigns of Hannibal, to suppress a wish that the great Carthaginian-the "nostris ex ossibus ultor" of Dido's dying imprecation—had not only pursued the self-styled descendants of Virgil's base pseudo-hero with fire and sword, but had completed his work by utterly extirpating that nest of immoderate and sanguinary robbers. But the fates ordered otherwise; and the unequalled warrior whom all the Roman armies could never conquer in Italy, was forced to succumb to that fortune before which all things

human were for a time doomed to yield; and a dose of poison became "Cannarum vindex et tanti sanguinis ultor.” *

In examining the arguments which have sometimes been advanced on behalf of conquests and conquerors, namely, that they are instruments of civilization, it will be proper to bear in mind that the irruption of the barbarians on the Roman empire does not fall under the signification of conquest here used. I speak not of a body of men, whether in a more or less savage state, seeking a new settlement, but of the chief or chiefs of a nation already in possession of a sufficient territory, seeking to extend their dominion over the territory already belonging to others. In regard to the argument referred to, I think it will be found, on examination, that the civilization produced by conquest is a very false, hollow, and unsound civilization; that it goes little, if at all, below the surface, and possesses little or nothing of the true nerve and sinews, heart and brain, of real civilization, which must develop itself naturally, and gradually, and healthily

* It may be remarked, as an example of the way in which the later Roman writers showed themselves the mock-birds of Virgil's song, that Juvenal, struck, no doubt, with the swelling sound of Virgil's line

"Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor "— attempted to copy its beauty and harmony when he calls the ring containing the poison which destroyed Hannibal

"Cannarum vindex ac tanti sanguinis ultor."

from within, not be forcibly impressed and forced on from without.

This is apparent from the so-called civilization introduced by the Romans among the nations they conquered, which fell to pieces, like a fabric of snow or sand, when the Roman power fell, being quite unable to withstand the attacks of the invading barbarians. And we may ask, too, what civilization the Franks introduced into Gaul, or the Normans into Italy, England, and Ireland. If civilization has been, or is to be, the result in these cases, it is not as a proximate, or even ultimate, consequence of conquest, but as a consequence of certain violent conflicts, struggles, or fermentations, which followed not in accordance with, but in reaction of, such conquest. In England, the advance made in rational and healthy free institutions above all the nations of the world is attributable, in great part, to what at first sight seemed likely to have a contrary effect. Certain circumstances in an event, the conquest by the Normans, which at first seemed and was a very deplorable one, made the earlier Anglo-Norman kings the most powerful kings of their time, but also raised up a resistance to them, so powerful as to make the English kings subsequently have a limited authority, when the other European kings held an unlimited or absolute authority. It would be very fallacious reasoning, however, to set this up as an argument in favour of conquest; and very unsafe to