s, misleading when applied to the
mild and beneficent hegemony exercised by the rulers and people of
England over their scattered transmarine dominions. It affords a
convenient peg on which hostile critics, such as Mr. Mallik, whose work
was reviewed last week in these columns,[99] as also those
ultra-cosmopolitan Englishmen who are the friends of every country but
their own, may hang partisan homilies dwelling on the brutality of
conquest and on all the harsh features of alien rule, whilst they leave
sedulously in the background that aspect of the case which Polybius,
parodying a famous saying of Themistocles, embodied in a phrase which he
attributes to the Greeks after they had been absorbed into the Roman
Empire, "If we had not been quickly ruined, we should not have been
saved." This pessimistic aspect of Imperialism has certainly to some
extent an historical basis. It is founded on the procedure generally
believed to have been adopted in the process by which Rome acquired the
dominion of the world. The careful attention given of late years to the
study of inscriptions, and generally the results obtained by the
co-operation established between historians and those who have more
especially studied other branches of science, such as archaeology,
epigraphy, and numismatics, have, however, now enabled us to approach
the question of Roman expansion with far greater advantages than those
possessed by writers even so late as the days of Mommsen. We are able to
reply with a greater degree of confidence than at any previous period to
the question of how far Roman policy was really associated with those
principles and practices which many are accustomed to designate as
Imperial. The valuable and erudite work which Mr. Reid has now given to
the world comes opportunely to remind us of a very obvious and
commonplace consideration. It is that although Roman expansion not only
began, but was far advanced during the days of the Republic, Roman
Imperialism did not exist before the creation of Roman Emperors, and did
not in any considerable degree develop the vices generally, and
sometimes rightly, attributed to the system until some while after
Republican had given way to Imperial sway. "The residuary impression of
the ancient world," Mr. Reid says in his preface, "left by a classical
education comprises commonly the idea that the Romans ran, so to speak,
a sort of political steam-roller over the ancient world. This has a
semblance o