The same is true of that phase of the modern movement which looks toward the formation of the world state. The forces at work here are admittedly varied and complex, but prominent among these agencies are the ethical. It is the broadening of the moral sympathies, the development of a true cosmopolitanism, a deepening consciousness of the brotherhood of men, the growth of a new social and international conscience--it is this slow evolution in the moral realm that has laid or is laying the true basis of the future world union. The universal state, once created,--this need not be argued,--would inevitably react powerfully and favorably upon the moral feelings and sympathies of men. It was the same in the ancient world. The admission to full Roman citizenship, through successive enfranchisements, of all the freemen of the Roman dominions was at once the sign and the cause of a vast moral development. As fellow citizens with equal rights and privileges, men came to know and feel their ethical kinship. Likewise the establishment of the world state registered a great moral advance and supplied the conditions of a still greater progress. Had not the moral forces worked with the Roman legions, the world union could never have been formed, or, at least, if once formed, could never have been maintained for the long period that it was. It is probably true that the bringing by Rome of such a wide reach of lands under her rule did as much to awaken the sense of the brotherhood of man as did the teachings of Hebrew prophet or the culture and philosophy of Greece. It was certainly the political union of the civilized world that helped to awaken in Cicero and in the later philosophers of the Empire the conviction that the reach of the moral sympathies should be as extended as the human race. Thus the wide empire created by Rome was a potent influence making for ethical universalism. Never since the unification of the ancient world by Rome have the moral feelings of men been quite so narrow as before; never since has the conception of human brotherhood, the ideal of a united world, seemed so entirely a dream. [Sidenote: Causes of the decline in morals under the later Republic: (_a_) the passing of the city state]