This was a murderous work, and in doing it the Romans became excessively
cruel, but it had to be done by some one before you could expect to have
great and peaceful civilizations like our own. The warfare of Rome is by
no means adequately explained by the theory of a deliberate immoral
policy of aggression,--"infernal," I believe, is the stronger adjective
which Dr. Draper uses. The aggressive wars of Rome were largely dictated
by just such considerations as those which a century ago made it
necessary for the English to put down the raids of the Scotch
Highlanders, and which have since made it necessary for Russia to subdue
the Caucasus. It is not easy for a turbulent community to live next to
an orderly one without continually stirring up frontier disturbances
which call for stern repression from the orderly community. Such
considerations go far towards explaining the military history of the
Romans, and it is a history with which, on the whole, we ought to
sympathize. In its European relations that history is the history of the
moving of the civilized frontier northward and eastward against the
disastrous encroachments of barbarous peoples. This great movement has,
on the whole, been steadily kept up, in spite of some apparent
fluctuation in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian era, and
it is still going on to-day.
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