and Gods of Ireland?--Behold this very Kelly
now!--What! is this he?--this raucous, pushing, red-haired,
huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile
bricklaying in Chicago;--this ward-politician; this--Well,
well; _Sic transit gloria mundi!_ And the Roman cad of the
second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He
had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added
to their lessons a native brutality of his own. His feet
were no longer on the Italian soil; _that_ was nothing sacred
to him now. His moral went as his power grew. His old tough
political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine
trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal
from him. He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces,
which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse
than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct
was there still: Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing
influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever
of manliness and decency had once gone with it.

Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause
to the physical effect. There are historians who will prove to
you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes: which were,
in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed.
They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too
much. The secret of it all is this: a people without the
Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the
Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called
by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to assume huge
responsibilities in the world. Their qualities were not equal to
the task. The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and
Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength. Why should
it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?--No; they
are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on
the right path; strength without the beauty sense,--yes, even
fortitude, strength of will,--turns at the touch of quickening
time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion,
brutality; ay, it is not strength:--the saving quality of
strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the
Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon
uncompassion, through they swept the world in a decade, within a
poor century or so were themselves swept away. Rome, because she
was only st