Never before in the history of the world down to our own day were there so many forces and circumstances making for cosmopolitanism in life and thought as in the age of the early Cæsars. The growth of the little city state of Rome into a world state had made all freemen actually or potentially citizens of the world. The political unity of the world had awakened the consciousness of a moral unity. In thought and feeling many select souls recognized themselves as brothers of all other men. It was not merely the world-wide reach of the Roman rule that promoted the growth of this cosmopolitanism, but contributing largely to it were the policies of the imperial government, many of whose agencies and institutions made directly and powerfully for the development of a sentiment of universal human kinship. The unification of the world on its physical side, by the creation of the splendid Roman roads and the facilities thus provided for world-wide trade and travel, had the same broadening effect upon the moral feelings that modern railways, steamboats, and telegraphs have upon the ethical sympathies of our own day. Furthermore, the practically autocratic authority of the Emperor tended to destroy class distinctions by reducing all to the same level of servitude, to obliterate national boundaries, and to weaken race prejudices. Then also, as the capital of the world, Rome had become, as a center and creator of cosmopolitan life, a second Alexandria. The character, too, of the slaves, drawn now largely from the East, and often superior in culture to their masters, tended to blur the distinctions between classes based on outer conditions, and to suggest the doctrine of equality in the sphere of the spirit. The army, also, recruited from every race and land in the Empire, and from the outside barbarian world as well, with the legions raised in one country serving in another, was a liberalizing agency, and a most effective one in breaking down race barriers and in widening the mental outlook and the moral sympathies of the traveled legionaries.