nd order, advances, its state will be
progressive, and we shall, perhaps, follow the example of the desolate
countries. All is race; there is no other truth.'

'Because it includes all others?' said Lord Henry.

'You have said it.'

'As for Vavasour's definition of civilisation,' said Coningsby,
'civilisation was more advanced in ancient than modern times; then what
becomes of the progressive principle? Look at the great centuries of the
Roman Empire! You had two hundred millions of human beings governed by
a jurisprudence so philosophical that we have been obliged to adopt
its laws, and living in perpetual peace. The means of communication,
of which we now make such a boast, were far more vast and extensive in
those days. What were the Great Western and the London and Birmingham to
the Appian and Flaminian roads? After two thousand five hundred years,
parts of these are still used. A man under the Antonines might travel
from Paris to Antioch with as much ease and security as we go from
London to York. As for free trade, there never was a really unshackled
commerce except in the days when the whole of the Mediterranean coasts
belonged to one power. What a chatter there is now about the towns, and
how their development is cited as the peculiarity of the age, and the
great security for public improvement. Why, the Roman Empire was the
empire of great cities. Man was then essentially municipal.'

'What an empire!' said Sidonia. 'All the superior races in all the
superior climes.'

'But how does all this accord with your and Coningsby's favourite theory
of the influence of individual character?' said Vavasour to Sidonia;
'which I hold, by-the-bye,' he added rather pompously, 'to be entirely
futile.'

'What is individual character but the personification of race,' said
Sidonia, 'its perfection and choice exemplar? Instead of being an
inconsistency, the belief in the influence of the individual is a
corollary of the original proposition.'

'I look upon a belief in the influence of individual character as a
barbarous superstition,' said Vavasour.

'Vavasour believes that there would be no heroes if there were a
police,' said Coningsby; 'but I believe that civilisation is only fatal
to minstrels, and that is the reason now we have no poets.'

'How do you account for the Polish failure in 1831?' said Lord Marney.
'They had a capital army, they were backed by the population, but they
failed. They had everything but a m