When Carthage fell, and Rome moved onward, without an equal enemy against whom to guard, to the dominion of the world of Mediterranean civilization, she approached and gradually realized the reign of universal peace, broken only by those intestine social and political dissensions which are finding their dark analogues in our modern times of infrequent war. As the strife between nations of that civilization died away, material prosperity, general cultivation and luxury, flourished, while the weapons dropped nervelessly from their palsied arms. The genius of Caesar, in his Gallic and Germanic campaigns, built up an outside barrier, which, like a dike, for centuries postponed the inevitable end, but which also, like every artificial barrier, gave way when the strong masculine impulse which first created it had degenerated into that worship of comfort, wealth, and general softness, which is the ideal of the peace prophets of to-day. The wave of the invaders broke in,--the rain descended, the floods came, the winds blew, and beat upon the house, and it fell, because not founded upon the rock of virile reliance upon strong hands and brave hearts to defend what was dear to them. Ease unbroken, trade uninterrupted, hardship done away, all roughness removed from life,--these are our modern gods; but can they deliver us, should we succeed in setting them up for worship? Fortunately, as yet we cannot do so. We may, if we will, shut our eyes to the vast outside masses of aliens to our civilization, now powerless because we still, with a higher material development, retain the masculine combative virtues which are their chief possession; but, even if we disregard them, the ground already shakes beneath our feet with physical menace of destruction from within, against which the only security is in constant readiness to contend. In the rivalries of nations, in the accentuation of differences, in the conflict of ambitions, lies the preservation of the martial spirit, which alone is capable of coping finally with the destructive forces that from outside and from within threaten to submerge all the centuries have gained.