sations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism.
It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, the
science of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and the
daring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas of
the Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident.
Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from every people, it
created first an empire, then a literature, an architecture, an
administration, and a new religion, that were the most tremendous
synthesis of the ancient world. So the Roman world turned out vaster
and more complex than the Greek, although never assuming proportions
exceeding the power of the human mind; and as it grew, it kept that
precious quality, wanting in the Greek, unity; hence, the lucid
clearness of Roman history. There is everything in it, and everything
radiates from one centre, so that comprehension is easy. Without doubt
it would be rash to declare that the history of Rome alone may serve
as the outline of universal history. It is quite likely that there
may be found another history that possesses the same two qualities
for which that of Rome is so notable--universality and unity--but one
thing we may affirm: up to this time the history of Rome alone has
fulfilled this office of universal compendium, which explains how it
has always been studied by the learned and lettered of every part of
the civilised European-American world, and how in modern intellectual
life it is the history universal and cosmopolitan _par excellence_.
This condition of things has a much greater practical importance than
is supposed. Indeed it would be a serious mistake to believe that
cosmopolitan catholicity is an ideal dower purely of Roman history,
for which all the sons of Rome may congratulate themselves as of a
thing doing honour only to their stirp. This universality forms part,
I should say, of the material patrimony of all the Latin stock; we may
number it in the historic inventory of all the good things the sons of
Rome possess and of all their reasonable hopes for the future.

This affirmation may at first appear to you paradoxical, strange, and
obscure, but I think a short exposition will suffice to clear it. The
universality of the history of Rome, the ease of finding in it models
in miniature of all our life will have this effect, that classical
studies remain the educational foundation of the intelligent classes
in all European-America