Of all Rome’s achievements in the field of politics none was so far-reaching in its influence and so lasting in its effects as her conquest of the world and her successful government of it for five hundred years or more. With the story of her conquests we are not concerned here. But, as President Butler of Columbia University has said in his _Annual Report_ for 1921: “No educated citizen of a modern free state can afford to ignore the lessons taught by the Roman Empire, which for centuries held together in a commonwealth that was both prosperous and contented peoples widely differing in religious faith, in racial origin, and in vernacular speech.” How did she weld them all, Britons, Gauls, Spaniards, and Africans, into one people whose feeling of unity was so strong that even in the intervening centuries it has not died out altogether? No national heroes will ever supplant Trajan or Ovid in the hearts of the Roumanian people. When the Italians invaded Tripoli a few years ago they thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of their great ancestors, and a political cartoon which had wide vogue in Italy at the time of the war and did much to stimulate enthusiasm for it showed a shadowy Roman commander, perhaps Scipio, landing in Africa at the head of an Italian army. How few modern empires can hope to establish such traditions as these, so far as peoples of alien races and religions are concerned! That the Romans were more successful in developing a feeling of solidarity and loyalty throughout their empire than modern nations have been, we have the testimony from different points of view of such competent judges as Lord Cromer and Boissier. In his _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_ Lord Cromer says: “If we turn to the comparative results obtained by ancient and modern imperialists; if we ask ourselves whether the Romans, with their imperfect means of locomotion and communication, their relatively low standard of public morality, and their ignorance of many economic and political truths, which have now become axiomatic, succeeded as well as any modern people in assimilating the nations which the prowess of their arms had brought under their sway, the answer can not be doubtful. They succeeded far better.” Elsewhere he remarks that “there has been no thorough fusion, no real assimilation between the British and their alien subjects, and, so far as we can now predict, the future will in this respect be but a repetition of the past.”