But may it not be that these men are here influenced by European manners? May they not, like the civilized and instructed classes of the Spaniards, be assimilated to Europe? _There_ precisely is the difference. A Moor, after spending twenty years in Europe, goes back and demeans himself as if he had never left home. They carry their habits with them, and at Gibraltar live much in the same way as to the south of the Straits. As a people, they avoid us more than any other, excepting, perhaps, the Japanese: yet, individually they have greater intercourse with us, and in a more familiar manner; because from the distance and the difficulties of the land journey, the pilgrims almost always go and return from Egypt in European vessels. As we returned into town, a stone nearly the size of a man’s head was shown to us, by which the skull of the Portuguese commander who first entered the place was, like that of Pyrrhus, broken by a woman from a tower. A Moorish sovereign, who was so wounded, despatched himself like Abimelech, with his own sword, to cover the disgrace. The Romans at one time substituted this place for Tangier, as a provincial capital; yet it has neither a harbour nor road, being at the extreme point of the land, and shut out by a range of mountains from a fertile and peopled country, while Tangier is at the bottom of a bay, surrounded with rich lands, and is on the highway from Spain to Mauritania, from the ocean to the interior. To us a capital is different from what it was to the Romans: we have a mass of organization and administration, which requires that it should be placed at the head in respect to the members. We expect to find all this in vigour under so rigorous a government as that of Rome. But Rome gave herself no such trouble; introduced neither principles, nor laws, nor language, nor costume. These spread, because not forced. The field of administration, down to her latter days, was kept sufficiently clear for each individual to embrace the whole: the subdivisions of modern statesmanship and government were unknown.[50] Her judicatories were solely appellant: the people were everywhere free to follow their own customs, execute their own laws, select their own magistrates, impose their own taxes. In fact, the Romans were kings: they reigned, they did not administer; nor did they scatter their strength in exciting irritation on every point; but remained with a force collected to smite resistance whenever it appeared, and which they were careful never to provoke by systematic interference. Ceuta might thus, cut off from traffic and population, be a good provincial capital for those masters in the art of governing men--that art which, like health in the body and judgment in the mind, depends not on science and labour, but abstinence and simplicity.