Let us try in a few words to sum up the philosophy of the epoch as it is given by our contemporaries. We are not leaving Livy behind us by showing how his work has been perfected. “Great queen,” said Bossuet, before Henrietta Maria’s tomb, “I gratify your tenderest desires in praising this great monarch, and your heart, dust though it is, awakes to hear me.” Livy would not listen with indifference to the modern philosophers who explain, perfect, and complete the history of his country. To act with a personal interest in view, and consequently to organise the means of so doing is the dominant trait in the history and genius of Rome. Therefore its spirit is that of calculating reflection rather than of poetical invention and philosophical speculation, and its character consists of a reasoned will, not of feelings or affections. From this arises that never-ending struggle with the unfruitfulness of a naturally sterile land, that contempt for him who loses his patrimony, the fame of him who increases it, economy, frugality, greed, avarice, the spirit of chicanery, all the virtues and all the vices which generate and preserve wealth, the tendency to regard property as a sacred trust, and the boundary of a field as a limitation of divine origin, the protection of lands and credit by severe laws, legal deeds drawn up in minute and inviolable forms--in a word, every institution calculated for the protection of acquired property. In other countries the natural family, established on the basis of a common origin, is ruled by the affections; but the Roman family, absolutely civil, founded on a community of obedience and of rites, is only the chattel and the property of the father, governed according to his will, subordinate to the state, ever bequeathed by law in the presence of the state, a kind of province in the hands of the father which supplies soldiers for the public benefit. Made up of different races, united by violence, the work of force and will, and not of relationship and nature, the Roman state contained two organised bodies, struggling regularly and legally, not through passion, but through interest, and united under the best devised and organised constitution that has ever been known. By the state’s systematic and methodical mode of conquest for the sole object of preserving and exploiting, military art was carried to the highest possible point, and political skill and administrative talent united to bring together by force the whole of the then known world into an empire organised by one dominant city.