y.

East of the Gobi Pamir barrier there has slowly grown up under these new
conditions the Chinese system. West and north of the Sahara Gobi barrier
of deserts and mountains, the extraordinarily strong and spacious
conceptions of the Romans succeeded in dominating the world, and do,
indeed, in a sort of mutilated way, by the powers of great words and
wide ideas, in Caesarism and Imperialism, in the titles of Czar, Kaiser,
and Imperator, in Papal pretension and countless political devices,
dominate it to this hour. For awhile these conceptions sustained a
united and to a large extent organized empire over very much of this
space. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a political
union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of a
thin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs and
refinements, over the scarcely touched national masses. It checked,
perhaps, but it nowhere succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitable
differentiation of province from province and nation from nation. The
forces of transit that permitted the Roman imperialism and its partial
successors to establish wide ascendancies, were not sufficient to carry
the resultant unity beyond the political stage. There was unity, but not
unification. Tongues and writing ceased to be pure without ceasing to
be distinct. Sympathies, religious and social practices, ran apart and
rounded themselves off like drops of oil on water. Travel was restricted
to the rulers and the troops and to a wealthy leisure class; commerce
was for most of the constituent provinces of the empire a commerce in
superficialities, and each province--except for Italy, which latterly
became dependent on an over-seas food supply--was in all essential
things autonomous, could have continued in existence, rulers and ruled,
arts, luxuries, and refinements just as they stood, if all other lands
and customs had been swept out of being. Local convulsions and
revolutions, conquests and developments, occurred indeed, but though the
stones were altered the mosaic remained, and the general size and
character of its constituent pieces remained. So it was under the
Romans, so it was in the eighteenth century, and so it would probably
have remained as long as the post-road and the sailing-ship were the
most rapid forms of transit within the reach of man. Wars and powers and
princes came and went, that was all. Nothing was changed, there was only
one state