Rome won her victories, wrote her laws, and laid the foundations of her world-wide empire, when her people gave social rather than individual expression to the force of their lives. A typical illustration we have of this in the fidelity of Regulus. A prisoner at Carthage, he is permitted to go to Rome to induce his countrymen to make peace with the Carthaginians. He pledged his word to return if he failed. On reaching Rome, however, instead of seeking to persuade his people to make peace, he appealed to them to continue the war. The social side of himself belonged to Rome; speaking through that, he called upon her to prosecute the war. The individual side of himself was personal; acting through that, he went back to Carthage in honor of his pledge, to be cruelly put to death by his captors. This single incident is sufficient to help us understand why, from her seven hills, Rome conquered and for a long time ruled the world. The individual was sunk in the _Roman_. Not, as in the case of Greece, that his personal identity might be swallowed up in the mass, but that he might find a personal identity as great as the empire, of whose social life he was the embodiment. Regulus was an epitome of Rome. In him was all her indomitable will, her moral sturdiness, her iron probity. In him she had a son, in the depth of whose spirit all the glory she had won in war, and all the control she had found in sacrifice, was safe. Regulus had the advantage of the Carthaginians, in that the larger, nobler side of himself was safe from their hate. The Roman, the social Regulus, was as eternal as the majesty, and fame, and mystery of the Roman empire. The doom of Rome, as a nation, was never sealed till the stress was removed from the social to the individual side of her people. She might have lived on among the nations, as fixed as her own eternal hills, if the temptations to self-indulgence and self-gratification had been resisted. Her downfall was not due to physical causes, but to her sins. Observance of the moral laws, which made her great, would have kept her great. When she threw her larger, social self into the fires of her individual lust and passion, she burned the foundations of her dominion, and a mighty wreck of shapeless ruins was all that was left of the once proud mistress of the world. V.