onception of _Weltpolitik;_ whereby we may understand how
little fitted Rome was for _Weltpolitik_ at all; how hoeing
cabbages and making summer campaigns,--as Mr. Stobart says, with
a commissariat put up for each soldier in a lunch-bag by his
wife,--were still her metier,--the Italian soil, whether in
actual or only potential possession--held already, or by the
grace of God soon to be stolen--still her inspiration. And this
Italian soil she was now about to leave forever.

The forces that led her to world-conquest were twofold, inner and
outer. The inner one was the summer campaign habit, formed
during several centuries; and the fact that she could form no
conception of life that did not include it: the impulse to
material expansion was deep in her soul, and ineradicable. She
might have followed it, perhaps, north and westward; finished
with Spain; gone up into Gaul (though in Gaul she might have
found, even at that time, possibly, an unmanageable strength);
she might even have carried her own ultimite salvation up into
Germany. But we have seen Darius flow victorious eastward
towards India, but unsuccessful when he tried the passes of the
west; and Alexander follow him in the same path, and not turn
westward at all. So you may say an eastward habit had been
formed, and inner-channels were worn for conquest in that
direction, but none in the other. Besides,--and this was the
outer of the two forces,--the East was crying out to Rome. There
were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the
safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with
them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic
time. To sit securely at home she must hold the Illyrian coast:
and, she thought, or events proved it to her, to hold that coast
safely, she must go conquering inland. Then again Egypt had
courted her alliance, for regions. The Ptolemy of the time was a
boy; and Philip of Macedon ind Antiochus of Syria had hatched a
plan to carve up his juicy realm for their own most delectable
feasting. It was the very year after peace--to call it that--had
been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an
exhausted Rome would have welcomed a breathing time, even at the
expense of losing her annual outing. And so indeed the people
were inclined to do. But the summer was icumen in; and
what were consuls and Senate for? Should they be as these
irresponsibles of the comitia? Should they fail to