Now as Gibbon’s great history shows, the history of all Europe and Western Asia since that time is really the story of this unique thing, the Empire, the Roman Empire, and its struggle to exist, to remain one, and to restore itself, when broken, to complete existence. It was broken naturally by the Adriatic crack, running in towards that fatal wedge out of the great plains of the nomads, Hungary; it was broken by the general incapacity of the Italians for navigation, due perhaps to characteristics of the Italian coast; it was broken by the intellectual inadequacies of a plutocracy. But the Empires that sprang from it, West and East, were only the results of a fission that left the idea of reunion perpetually alive; the Holy Roman Empire, the Tzardom, the Imperialism of Napoleon, even the Austrian Empire and the Hohenzollern Empire, were all logically and legitimately the products of the original Empire, legitimately Empires in origin and intention, attempts to recover a universal sway; parts in a great dreary, futile European drama on which at last in these days the curtain falls. There has indeed only been one real Empire in the world, this that centred upon Rome and the Mediterranean. Britain played a certain part in this Empire; Henry VIII, for example, was Imperial candidate against Charles V and the King of France; but the rôle of Britain therein has generally been a marginal one. The importance of England to mankind began only when it turned its face from the Empire and from thoughts of the Empire to the ocean. What we call to-day the British Empire is a new thing and a different thing from the Roman Empire, created by new and greater forces, and deserving an entirely distinctive name.