On page 277 the Roman senators and the great equestrians are “vulgar and greedy spirits.” But do not imagine that the poorer Romans were any better; they, in their turn, are “ignorant, unstable, and equally greedy”; and, once again, on this same page, all these Romans are “Neanderthals.” On page 278 he is able to answer the question which puzzled the Ancients in the later days of the Roman Republic. Those mighty men asked themselves, even while they were founding a world state, in what they were to blame, confessed their errors, and sought remedy perpetually. But in _this_ book “we” have the advantage over them. “We (that is, Mr. Wells) _who can look at the problem with a larger presentation_ can see what had happened to Rome.” On the same page there is a doubtful admission that Tiberius Gracchus may have been “more like an honest man” than the other cowards and mediocrities of the Roman State. But Gracchus, again, was defective compared with the modern authors of Outlines of History in that “he did not understand how much easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns than to return it.” However, he stands excused; for it seems that even to-day, in spite of progress, “few people” other than the Author “understand” this wearisome and age-long truism. No wonder that, after all this, Mr. Wells is astonished at the voluntary association of external States with the Roman Empire which began before the end of the second century B.C. Among their other defects, we are told, the Romans could not organize sea power. They foolishly marched their troops, not only because they were somehow unaccountably ignorant of railways (as was Alexandria, he bitterly complains, of typewriters) but because they had not the military sense to see how much easier it is to embark a large army in small sailing vessels at the mercy of the weather, and disembark them, than to march them round a not much greater distance by land.