"All this is most disheartening," said Cæsar. "To treat foreign policy merely as a card in the little game of electioneering is most injurious to the interests of a great country. England, like every other country in Europe, has been made in her Downing Street rather than at the polls or in Committee-rooms. European currents determine the minor currents of the home policies of the several countries. You say, and with the utmost right, O Columbus, that you have given the English their most powerful leverage. But would you have thought of doing what you did do, had not a vast event in South-eastern Europe, the coming of the Turk, driven your countrymen to the discovery of a western route, the eastern being closed by the Turk? "I wish the Parthians in mid-Asia, in my time, had been as strong as the Turks were in your time. We should have had you while I lived, and by the discovery of America over fifteen hundred years before you did discover it, the whole trend of the world's history would have been different. For you would have given this immense new leverage to the Roman Empire instead of to little England. It is rather amusing to hear the English talk of the 'Unspeakable Turk,' a nation to whom they are, if indirectly, more obliged than to any other nation of the past or present, excepting the French. "The truth is, that no nation makes itself. It is made by itself only in so far as it reacts against the powerful influence of the others, its neighbours and their neighbours. If these neighbours are feeble, and second-rate nations, the reacting nation itself will remain feeble and second-rate. The greatness of the present Germans is a veritable godsend to the English, since the decadence of the French. By reacting against it properly, England will be newly invigorated. "The scribblers of the little ones ascribe the downfall of the Empire which I founded to the rottenness of my Romans. How untrue! My Empire decayed because, comprising as it did all the then known civilised nations, it lacked a great adversary by reacting against whom it might have reinvigorated itself from time to time. They say the Barbarians, chiefly the Teutons, overpowered us. Alas! I wish they had been much stronger than they were. They never overpowered us. Had the Greeks and Macedonians been able to concert great military measures against us, we should have been forced to give up the fatal idea of an all-compassing Empire, and should have finally arrived at a fine and vitalising balance of power in the Mediterranean.