to Arles to learn when Aetius might be expected in relief and how far the Visigoths would move, not for their own defence only, but against the common enemy. Anianus, for such was the bishop’s name, thus appears as the representative, the ambassador and the governor of the city. In Arles, to his delight, he found not only a secure and even splendid Roman government, but the great general himself, Aetius, who received him with impress. Anianus urged the necessity of an immediate assistance. He reckoned that it would be possible to hold out till the middle of June, but no longer. Aetius heard him patiently and promised that by then he would relieve the city. Anianus was not too soon, he had scarce returned to Orleans when Attila began the siege. It will be asked, and with reason, why it was that Rome had waited so long before interfering to defend her great western province against this “wild beast”? Why had Aetius not marched out of Italy at the head of his armies months before? why had he waited till all the North was a ruin before he carried the eagles over the Alps and confronted this savage and his hordes with the ordered ranks of the army of civilisation? The answer may be found in the war we are fighting to-day against a similar foe. The French failed to defend the North against the modern Attila because they were too long uncertain which way he would come and where he would strike hardest. They could not be sure which was the decisive point of the German attack. This it was that kept so great a proportion of their armies in Alsace and upon that frontier. They credited the German with more subtlety than he possessed. They failed to grasp the gigantic simplicity of the Barbarian plan; the mighty hammer-stroke that shattered Belgium and plunged in to destroy all the North of France. They looked for something less blindly brutal and more wise. They could not believe that the German would destroy his whole case and outrage the moral consciousness of the world by violating the neutrality of Belgium. They failed to comprehend the essential stupidity of the Barbarian. They were wrong. Aetius was wrong also, but with perhaps more excuse. He could not make up his mind where the real attack of Attila upon the Empire was to be delivered. What if the descent upon Gaul were but a feint and Italy were the real objective, Lombardy the true battlefield? There was this also; in Africa, Genseric, Attila’s ally, waited and threatened to descend upon the coast. Aetius overrated the intelligence of his enemy as much as did Joffre. Neither understood the force which opposed him, which it was to be their business and their glory to meet and to break.