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Page 46
What the ultimate result will be it would be vain to prophesy,--the
data for a guess even are not at hand; but it is not equally
impossible to note present conditions, and to suggest present
considerations, which may shape proximate action, and tend to favor
the preponderance of that form of civilization which we cannot but
deem the most promising for the future, not of our race only, but of
the world at large. We are not living in a perfect world, and we may
not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally
perfect. Time and staying power must be secured for ourselves by that
rude and imperfect, but not ignoble, arbiter, force,--force potential
and force organized,--which so far has won, and still secures, the
greatest triumphs of good in the checkered history of mankind. Our
material advantages, once noted, will be recognized readily and
appropriated with avidity; while the spiritual ideas which dominate
our thoughts, and are weighty in their influence over action, even
with those among us who do not accept historic Christianity or the
ordinary creeds of Christendom, will be rejected for long. The eternal
law, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual,
will obtain here, as in the individual, and in the long history of our
own civilization. Between the two there is an interval, in which force
must be ready to redress any threatened disturbance of an equal
balance between those who stand on divergent planes of thought,
without common standards.
And yet more is this true if, as is commonly said, faith is failing
among ourselves, if the progress of our own civilization is towards
the loss of those spiritual convictions upon which it was founded, and
which in early days were mighty indeed towards the overthrowing of
strongholds of evil. What, in such a case, shall play the tremendous
part which the Church of the Middle Ages, with all its defects and
with all the shortcomings of its ministers, played amid the ruin of
the Roman Empire and the flood of the barbarians? If our own
civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and
love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves
or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a
flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living
faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus
press upon us,--in either event we need time, and time can be gained
only by organized material force.
Nor is this view advanced in any spirit of unfriendliness to the other
ancient civilizations, whose genius admittedly has been and is foreign
to our own. One who believes that God has made of one blood all
nations of men who dwell on the face of the whole earth cannot but
check and repress, if he ever feels, any movement of aversion to
mankind outside his own race. But 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 C�sar so expanded 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 protracted 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 Mommsen, "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 indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is
now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants
of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with
the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic
people were ruined by the transalpine wars of C�sar 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 civilization had not become
naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain.
Inasmuch as C�sar 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 empire by
rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian
tribes along the frontier with the view of warding 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
C�sar 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 C�sar."
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