time as the
period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII.
Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to
make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars,
massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of
authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and
horror.

Under the reign of these monsters [he says] the slavery of the
Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one
occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive
conquests, which rendered their condition more wretched than that
of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.[1]

Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy
assertion that Caesar could only secure for the dying ancient world a
peaceful twilight.

As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the
most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which
the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential
to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he
says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must
have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of
Sidonius' palace."

We know what was coming [he continues],[2] the men of the time knew
it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own estimate
that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are
content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.

The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is
hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not
expand, especially towards the close of that time.

... Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly
handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our
conceptions of human dignity and of right.... If a man will stand
back in the time of the Antonines and look around him and forward
to our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at
once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved
imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church
which would meet indifferently in centres 1,500 miles apart, in the
extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
vast travel was not even not