To me it appears that the Empire was a necessity of the second kind; that it was an inevitable concession to incurable evil, not a new development of good. The Roman morality, the morality which had produced and sustained the Republic, was now in a state of final and irremediable decay. That morality was narrow and imperfect, or rather it was rudimentary, a feeble and transient prototype of the sounder and more enduring morality which was soon to be born into the world. It was the morality of devotion to a single community, and in fact consisted mainly of the performance of duty to that community in war. But it was real and energetic after its measure and its own time. It produced a type of character, which, if reproduced now, would be out of date and even odious, but which stands in history dignified and imposing even to the last. Nor was it without elements of permanent value. It contributed largely to the patriotism of the seventeenth century, a patriotism which has now perhaps become obsolete in its turn, and is superseded in our aspirations by an ideal with less of right and self-assertion, with more of duty and of social affection, yet did good service against the Stuarts. The Roman morality, together with dignity of character, produced as usual simplicity of life. It produced a reverence for the majesty of law, the voice of the community. It produced relations between the sexes, and domestic relations generally, far indeed below the ideal, yet decidedly above those which commonly existed in the pagan world. It produced a high degree of self-control and of abstinence from vices which prevailed elsewhere. It produced fruits of intellect, some original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice. What was of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced, though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly without regard for the good of the subject races. Thus that political unity of the nations round the Mediterranean was brought about, which was the necessary precursor and protector of a union of a better kind. A measure of the same praise is due to Alexander, who was a conqueror of the higher order for a similar reason--namely, that though a Macedonian prince, he was imbued with the ideas and the morality of the Greek republics.