There are few instances of such attempts. Indeed, they were never made on a grand scale, by any truly sagacious governments of either ancient or modern times. The Romans were too politic to indulge in such hazardous experiments. Alexander, before them, had never ventured it, and his successors, convinced, either by reason or instinct, of the futility of such efforts, had been contented to reign, like the conqueror of Darius, over a vast mosaic of nations, each of which retained its own habits, manners, laws, and administrative forms, and, at least so long as it preserved its ethnical identity, resembled its fellow-subjects in nothing but submission to the same fiscal and military regulations. There were, it is true, among the nations subdued by the Romans, some whose codes contained practices so utterly repugnant to their masters, that the latter could not possibly have tolerated them. Such were the human sacrifices of the Druids, which were, indeed, visited with the severest penalties. But the Romans, with all their power, never succeeded in completely extirpating this barbarous rite. In the Narbonnese, the victory was easy, for the Gallic population had been almost completely replaced by Roman colonists; but the more intact tribes of the interior provinces made an obstinate resistance; and, in the peninsula of Brittany, where, in the fourth century, a British colony re-imported the ancient instincts with the ancient blood, the population, in spite of the Romans, continued, either from patriotism or veneration for their ancient traditions, to butcher fellow-beings on their altars, as often as they could elude the vigilance of their masters. All revolts began with the restoration of this fearful feature of the national creed, and even Christianity could not entirely efface its traces, until after protracted and strenuous efforts. As late as the seventeenth century, the shipwrecked were murdered, and wrecks plundered in all the maritime provinces where the Kimric blood had preserved itself unmixed. These barbarous customs were in accordance with the manners of a race which, not being yet sufficiently admixed, still remained true to its irrepressible instincts.