policy hardly to be expected from a democracy, a constant succession of capable generals and administrators such as a despotic hereditary monarchy seldom provides, for a monarchy of that kind must from time to time have feeble or dissolute sovereigns, under whom bad selections will be made for important posts, policy will oscillate, and no adequate support will be given to the armies or fleets which are maintaining the interests of the nation abroad. A republic is moreover likely to have a larger stock of capable and experienced men on which to draw during the process of conquering and organizing. The two conspicuous instances in which monarchies have acquired and long held vast external dominions are the Empires of Spain and Russia. The former case is hardly an exception to the doctrine just stated, because the oceanic Empire of Spain was won quickly and with little fighting against opponents immeasurably inferior, and because it had no conterminous enemies to take advantage of the internal decay which soon set in. In the case of Russia the process has been largely one of natural expansion over regions so thinly peopled and with inhabitants so backward that no serious resistance was made to an advance which went on rather by settlement than by conquest. It is only in the Caucasus and in Turkistan that Russia has had to establish her power by fighting. Her conflicts even with the Persians and the Ottoman Turks have been, as Moltke is reported to have said, battles of the one-eyed against the blind. But it must be added that Russia has shown during two centuries a remarkable power of holding a steady course of foreign policy. She sometimes trims her sails, and lays the ship upon the other tack, but the main direc

tion of the vessel's course is not altered. This must be the result of wisdom or good fortune in the choice of ministers, for the Romanoff dynasty has not contained more than its fair average of men of governing capacity.

There is one other point in which the Romans and the English may be compared as conquering powers. Both triumphed by force of character. During the two centuries that elapsed between the destruction of Carthage, when Rome had already come to rule many provinces, and the time of Vespasian, when she had ceased to be a city and was passing into a nation conterminous with her dominions, the Romans were the ruling race of the world, small in numbers, even if we count the peoples of middle Italy as Romans, but gifted with such talents for war and government, and possessed of such courage and force of will as to be able, not only to dominate the whole civilized world and hold down its peoples, but also to carry on a succession of bloody civil wars among themselves without giving those peoples any chance of recovering their freedom. The Roman armies, though superior in discipline to the enemies they had to encounter, except the Macedonians and Greeks, were not generally superior in arms, and had no resources of superior scientific knowledge at their command. Their adversaries in Africa, in Greece, and in Asia Minor were as far advanced in material civilization as they were themselves. It was their strenuous and indomitable will, buoyed up by the pride and self-confidence born of a long succession of victories in the past, that enabled them to achieve this unparalleled triumph. The triumph was a triumph of character, as their poet felt when he penned the famous line, Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.

And after the inhabitants of the City had ceased to be the heart of the Empire, this consciousness of greatness passed to the whole population of the Roman world when they compared themselves with the barbarians outside their frontiers. One finds it even in the pages of Procopius, a Syrian writing in Greek, after the western half of the Empire had been dismembered by barbarian invasions.

The English conquered India with forces much smaller than those of the Romans; and their success in subjugating a still vaster population in a shorter time may thus appear more brilliant. But the English had antagonists immeasurably inferior in valour, in discipline, in military science, and generally also in the material of war, to those whom the Romans overcame. Nor had they ever either a first-rate general or a monarch of persistent energy opposed to them. No Hannibal, nor even a Mithradates, appeared to bar their path. Hyder Ali had no nation behind him; and fortune spared them an encounter with the Afghan Ahmed Shah and the Sikh Ranjit Singh. Their most formidable opponents might rather be compared with the gallant but untrained Celtic Vercingetorix, or the showy but incompetent Antiochus the Great. It was only when Europeans like Dupleix came upon the scene that they had men of their own kind to grapple with; and Dupleix had not the support from home which Clive could count on in case of dire necessity. Still the conquest of India was a splendid achievement, more striking and more difficult, if less romantic, than the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortez or the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro, though it must be admitted that the courage of these two adventurers in venturing

far into unknown regions with a handful of followers has never been surpassed. Among the English, as among the Romans, the sense of personal force, the conscious ascendency of a race so often already victorious, with centuries of fame behind them, and a contempt for the feebler folk against whom they were contending, were the main source of that dash and energy and readiness to face any odds which bore down all resistance. These qualities have lasted into our own time. No more brilliant examples were ever given of them than in the defence of the Fort at Lucknow and in the siege of Delhi at the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8. And it is worth noting that almost the only disasters that have ever befallen the British arms have occurred where the general in command was either incompetent, as must sometimes happen in every army, or was wanting in boldness. In the East, more than anywhere else, confidence makes for victory, and one victory leads on to another.

It is by these qualities that the English continue to hold India. In the higher grades of the civil administration which they fill there are only about one thousand persons and these one thousand control two hundred and eighty-seven millions, doing it with so little friction that they have ceased to be surprised at this extraordinary fact. The English have impressed the imagination of the people by their resistless energy and their almost uniform success. Their domination seems to have about it an element of the supernatural, for the masses of India are still in that mental condition which looks to the supernatural for an explanation of whatever astonishes it. The British Raj fills them with a sense of awe and mystery. That nearly three hundred millions

of men should be ruled by a few palefaced strangers from beyond the great and wide sea, strangers who all obey some distant power, and who never, like the lieutenants of Oriental sovereigns, try to revolt for their own benefit, this seems too wonderful to be anything but the doing of some unseen and irresistible divinity. I heard at Lahore an anecdote which, slight as it is, illustrates the way in which the native thinks of these things. A tiger had escaped from the Zoological Gardens, and its keeper, hoping to lure it back, followed it. When all other inducements had failed, he lifted up his voice and solemnly adjured it in the name of the British Government, to which it belonged, to come back to its cage. The tiger obeyed.

Now that we have rapidly surveyed the more salient points of resemblance or analogy between these two empires, it remains to note the capital differences between them, one or two of which have been already incidentally mentioned. On the most obvious of all I have already dwelt. It is the fact that, whereas the Romans conquered right out from their City in all directions-south, north, west, and east-so that the capital, during the five centuries from B.C. 200 (end of the Second Punic War) to A. D. 325 (foundation of Constantinople), stood not far from the centre of their dominions, England has conquered India across the ocean, and remains many thousands of miles from the nearest point of her Indian territory. Another not less obvious difference is perhaps less important than it seems. Rome was a city, and Britain is a country. Rome, when she stepped outside Italy to establish in Sicily her first province, had a free population of possibly only seventy or eighty thousand souls. Britain, when she began her