The same assumption is made in Lord Morley's _Compromise_ (ed. 1888, p. 108) in the allusion to "peoples so devoid of the sovereign faculty of political coherency as were the Greeks and the Jews." Lord Morley's proposition is that such peoples may still evolve great civilising ideas; but though that is true, the implied thesis as to "faculty" weakens even the truth. The case of the Jews is to be explained in exactly the same way as that of the Greeks, the face of Palestine being disjunct and segregate in a peculiar degree. Other "Semites," living in great plains, were united in great monarchies. The sound view of the case as to Rome is put by Hertzberg: "Soll man im Gegensatze zu der hellenischen Geschichte es in kürzester Fassung bezeichnen, so kann man etwa sagen, die italische Landesnatur stellte der Ausbildung eines grossen _einheitlich_ geordneten Staates durchaus nicht die gewaltigen Hindernisse entgegen, wie das in Griechenland der Fall war" (_Gesch. von Hellas und Rom_, ii, 7). Cp. Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 9, as to "the vast heights which effectually separate tribes." Dr. Cunningham puts it (_Western Civilisation_, i, 152, 160) that Roman expansion in Italy came of the need to reach a true frontier of defence, in the lack of physical barriers to the early States. (So Lord Cromer, _Anc. and Mod. Imperialism_, 1910, p. 19.) It seems more plausible to say that all of the States concerned were positively disposed to conquest, and that the physical conditions of Italy made possible an overrunning which in early Greece was impossible. The theory of "faculty," consistently applied on Mr. Fowler's and Lord Morley's lines, would credit the French with an innate gift of union much superior to that of the Germans--at least in the modern period--and the Chinese with the greatest "faculty" of all. But the long maintenance of one rule over all China is clearly due in large part to the "great facility of internal intercourse" (Davis, _The Chinese_, Introd.) so long established. The Roman roads were half the secret of the cohesion of the Empire. Dr. Draper suggests, ingeniously but inaccurately, that Rome had strength and permanence because of lying east and west, and thus possessing greater racial homogeneity than it would have had if it lay north and south (_Intel. Devel. of Europe_, _i_, 11). On the other hand, mountainous Switzerland remains still cantonally separate, though the pressure of surrounding States, beginning with that of Austria, forced a political union. Compare the case of the clans of the Scottish Highlands down to the road-making period after the last Jacobite rising. See the principle discussed in Mr. Spencer's _Principles of Sociology_, i, § 17.