This was the beginning of a career of conquest which made the glorious country we know as France into the most valuable part of the Roman Empire, and later on into the most compact and gifted nationality in Europe. What motives inspired Cæsar in all he did during the nine years he spent there we need not ask, for we can only guess the answer; though he has left us his own story of his campaigns in simple straightforward Latin, he has not chosen to tell us what was all along at the back of his mind. Ambition, says the superficial historian; the desire to make himself in due time tyrant of Rome and the Empire. But we may take it as certain that Cæsar, a man whose health was never strong, would not have exposed himself to constant peril of his life for nine successive years had he really all the time been nursing a secret ambition which death or serious illness might at any time destroy. What he really seems to have loved, like C. Gracchus, was work—steady, hard work with no one to hinder him, and with a definite practical object before him. Doubtless further hopes or fears were in his mind, but this great practical genius, with an intellect characteristically Roman,[10] though more scientific in its tendency than that of any other Roman known to us, was always bent on the work immediately in front of him, and never rested till it was completed to his satisfaction. When Cæsar hurried up to check the Helvetii in 58 B.C. there was but one Roman province in Gaul, the south-eastern part of modern France (which still teems with Roman remains and inscriptions), together with a considerable district to the west of it at the foot of the Pyrenees. When he finally left Gaul at the end of 50, the whole of modern France and Belgium had been added to the Empire, though not as yet organised into provinces. He did not take long to reach our Channel and to subdue the tribes on the coast; he began the written history of our island by invading it twice, and recording such information as he could gain about its geography and inhabitants. He crossed the Rhine into Germany by a bridge constructed for him by his engineers: and the method of building this bridge survives in his book to puzzle the ingenuity of scholars as well as school-boys. The Gauls were doubtless amazed at these performances, as he meant them to be; and, after one heroic effort to save themselves from becoming an appendage of a Mediterranean empire, they had to submit. While we can feel with these noble efforts for freedom, or blame Cæsar for what sometimes seems unnecessary cruelty, we must remember that from this time forward the country from the Rhine to the ocean becomes a great factor in European civilisation.