But burdens which seem light, if measured by area, may be heavy if measured by ability to pay. Yet when has ability to pay been greater in the regions bordering the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean than under the Roman Empire? Travel round it in imagination, eastward from the Atlantic coast of Morocco till returning westward you reach the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and you will have skirted a region, still of immense natural wealth, once filled with great cities, and fertile farms, better governed during the Empire than it has ever been governed since (at least till Algeria became French and Egypt British); including among its provinces what were great states before the Roman rule, and have been great states since that rule decayed, divided by no international jealousies, oppressed by no fear of conquest, enterprising, cultured. Remember that to estimate its area of taxation and recruiting you must add to these regions Bulgaria, Servia, much of Austria and Bavaria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, and most of Britain, and you have conditions favourable to military strength and economic prosperity rarely equalled in the modern world and never in the ancient. Our observer however might, very rightly, feel that a far-spreading Empire like that of Rome, including regions profoundly differing in race, history and religion, would be liable to other dangers than those which arise from mere external aggression. One of the first questions, therefore, which he would be disposed to ask, is whether so heterogeneous a state was not in perpetual danger of dissolution through the disintegrating influence of national sentiments. He would learn probably, with a strong feeling of surprise, that with the single exception of the Jews, the constituent nations, once conquered, were not merely content to belong to the Empire, but could scarcely imagine themselves doing anything else: that the Imperial system appealed, not merely to the material needs of the component populations, but also to their imagination and their loyalty; that Gaul, Spain, and Britain, though but recently forced within the pale of civilisation, were as faithful to the Imperial ideal as the Greek of Athens or the Hellenised Orientals of Syria; and that neither historic memories, nor local patriotism, neither disputed succession, nor public calamities, nor administrative divisions, ever really shook the sentiment in favour of Imperial Unity. There might be more than one Emperor: but there could only be one Empire. Howsoever our observer might disapprove of the Imperial system he would therefore have to admit that the Empire, with all its shortcomings, its absolutism and its bureaucracy, had solved more successfully than any government, before or since, the problem of devising a scheme which equally satisfied the sentiments of East and West; which respected local feelings, encouraged local government; in which the Celt, the Iberian, the Berber, the Egyptian, the Asiatic,