Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits, originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer plunder;[448] the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the Roman rule has been successfully resisted--shall we say, by modern enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian Abyssinia is so still. As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take place[449] by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow, even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"[450]--as who should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had to" be taken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact, which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights."[451] Can it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?