The Second Punic War is the best known of campaigns. Every Roman army that took the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy was open to the army of Hannibal, and (wherever that army was present—but only there) at his mercy. In spite of such miracles the Phœnician attempt completely failed. It failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between the Phœnician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the western blood. [Sidenote: The Failure of Carthage] The army which Hannibal led recognised the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies must receive a wage, must be “volunteer”; and meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome “interfered with business”; on this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her was made. The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister. The Italian confederation was true because it reposed on other than economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat. The very Gauls in Hannibal’s army, for all their barbaric anger against Rome, were suspected by their Carthaginian employers, and in Rome itself an exalted resolve, quite alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was the only result of misfortune. Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber nomads, whose vague sense of cousinship with the Italians was chiefly shown in their contempt for the merchant cities, harassed Carthage perpetually; and when at last the Roman armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage fell. For somewhat more than fifty years she continued to live without security of territory or any honour, harassed by the nomad kings whom she dared not strike because they were the allies of Rome. She was still enormous in her wealth and numbers, it was only her honour that was gone; if indeed she had ever comprehended honour as did her rival. [Sidenote: The Destruction of Carthage]