This position can scarcely be disputed, save by denying the reality of any distinction between just and unjust in international conduct; and against this denial may be set not only the evidence of every age, but of every language above the stage of mere barbarism. Disregard of the difference is one of the best measures of the civilisation of a people or epoch. We at once, for instance, form a higher estimate of the civilisation of ancient India, when we read in Arrian that her kings were so apprehensive of committing an unjust aggression that they would not lead their armies out of India for the conquest of other nations.[331] One of the best features in the old pagan world was the importance attached to the justice of the motives for breaking the peace. The Romans appear never to have begun a war without a previous consultation with the College of Fecials as to its justice; and in the same way, and for the same purpose, the early Christian emperors consulted the opinion of the bishops. If a Roman general made an unjust attack upon a people his triumph was refused, or at least resisted; nor are the instances infrequent in which the senate decreed restitution where a consul, acting on his own responsibility, had deprived a population of its arms, its lands, or its liberties.[332] Hence the Romans, with all their apparent aggressiveness, won the character of a strict regard to justice, which was no small part of the secret of their power. ‘You boast,’ the Rhodians said to them, ‘that your wars are successful because they are just, and plume yourselves not so much on the victory which concludes them as on the fact that you never begin them without good cause.’[333] Conquest corrupted the Romans in these respects as it has done many another people; but even to the end of the Republic the tradition of justice survived; nor is there anything finer in the history of that people than the attempt of the party headed by Ateius the tribune to prevent Crassus leaving Rome when he was setting out to make war upon the Parthians, who not only had committed no injury, but were the allies of the Republic; or than the vote of Cato, that Cæsar, who, in time of peace, had slain or routed 300,000 Germans, should be given up to the people he had injured in atonement for the wrong he had done to them.