The general principles of Rome in the government of her conquests were manly and wise. When the soldier had done his work—and it was done vigorously, yet with but little violence beyond that which was essential for complete subjugation—the sword slept as an instrument of evil, and awoke only as an instrument of justice. If neighboring kingdoms quarreled, a legion marched across the border and brought the belligerents to sudden reason; dismissed their armies to their hearths and altars, and sent the angry chiefs to reconcile their claims in an Italian dungeon. If a disputed succession threatened to embroil the general peace, the proconsul ordered the royal competitors to embark for Rome, and there settle the right before the senate. The barbaric invasions which had periodically ravaged the Eastern empires even in their day of power were repelled with a terrible vigor. The legions left the desert covered with the tribe for the feast of the vulture, and showed to Europe the haughty leaders of the Tatar, Gothic, and Arab myriads in fetters, dragging wains, digging in mines, or sweeping the highways. If peace could be an equivalent for freedom, the equivalent was never so amply secured. The world within this iron boundary nourished; the activity and talent of man were urged to the highest pitch; the conquered countries were turned from wastes and forests into fertility; ports were dug upon naked shores; cities swelled from villages; population spread over the soil once pestilential and breeding only the weed and the serpent. The sea was covered with trade; the pirate and the marauder were unheard of or hunted down. Commercial enterprise shot its lines and communications over the map of the earth, and regions were then familiar which even the activity of the revived ages of Europe has scarcely made known. [Sidenote: The Absence of Genius] Those were the wonders of great power steadily directed to a great purpose. General coercion was the simple principle, and the only talisman of a Roman Emperor was the chain, except where it was casually commuted for the sword; the universality of the compression atoned for half its evil. The natural impulse of man is to improvement; he requires only security from rapine. The Roman supremacy raised round him an impregnable wall. It was the true government for an era when the habits of reason had not penetrated the general human mind. Its chief evil was in its restraint of those nobler and loftier aspirations of genius and the heart which from time to time raise the general scale of mankind.