and both had the institutions which seem to us
to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the
lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman
Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britons
were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being
Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In
truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people came
to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic origin
was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself
obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it
could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the
Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had
to have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire
necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not
very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving
emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length
the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was
Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation
which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to
protect or to tear down.

About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The
present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the
most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body
on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a
commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another
historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything
more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even
pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long
afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held,
perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still
haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen,
because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary
that the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it might fail. Hence
the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed
Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law
might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere
military lawlessness. Therefo