rong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life
except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest
from the Spirit. Her people were not called, like the Huns
or Mongols, to be a destroyer race: the Law designed them
for builders. But to build you must have the Balance, the
proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical:
it is the one foundation. Rome's grand assets at the start were
a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order: grand assets
indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied.
In Rome it was, largely.

To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compassion:
--that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood,
which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum
nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions:
scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing
with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will
and purposes. Prophesy direst sorrow for that man! Nature will
not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till
a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has
been evolved in him. She will give him rope; let him multiply
his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is
its own punishment and cure. His selfishness sinks by its own weight
to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall
be the slave of his body and passions, yet keeping the old desire
to excel;--that common vice shall bring him down to the level of
those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops
he believed his place of old. Then he shall be scourged with
self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural
punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked
Erinyes with whips of wire. In that horrible school, struggling
to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in
ignominy, sorrow and shame;--and at last shall count it all well
worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no
atribute, but Alaya's self,--Compassion. So Karma has its
ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within
are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for
man. This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that
could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.

Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on
to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to