Even history has its reasons that reason often fails to understand. When news reached Rome in August 70 C.E. that Judea was conquered, the temple burned and the Jewish people subjugated, the Roman populace greeted it with the infamous cry, "Hierosolyma est perdita"; there was rejoicing at the downfall and humiliation of the Jewish state. Eighteen hundred and forty-seven years later, after the deafening cries "Hierosolyma est perdita" were shouted in the streets of the eternal city, an Italian army leaves Rome with Palestine again as its objective; but this time it marches not with the object of annihilating Judea, but, as an official message puts it--to enable the allied powers to wrest the Holy Land from the Turks, to turn it over eventually to the Jews, and thus to rebuild Judea. Even if there should be little to the Roman announcement, it is not lacking a pathetic touch; it testifies to the grim irony of history. The same Rome that once destroyed Judea is making public its intention today to help rebuild it. Our ancestors, who were the tragic witnesses of the cruel destruction of Judea, would surely not think of the possibility that after a lapse of nearly two thousand years, an army should leave Rome for Palestine with the object of helping to reinstate the Jewish people in the land of its forefathers; nor could anyone have foreseen that the Rome of old, that aimed at the subjugation of small nationalities, would be succeeded by a new Rome that pronounces its stand for the rights and political re-establishment of small and oppressed nationalities. Of course, people will say that modern Rome can in no way be compared to ancient Rome and that the two have nothing in common. However, those who have read Montesquieu and Hegel on the deeds of ancient Rome and those who have followed the development of modern Rome, will recognize the close similarity between the two. As far as power and political and strategic genius go, modern Rome, it is true, cannot be compared to its predecessor of two thousand years ago; but if traditions, surroundings and other sociological factors that give a people shape and form count for anything, the Roman of today is bound to have a good deal in common with the Roman of two thousand years ago, even if the one is not racially the offspring of the other.