Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observed that the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Caesar, as I have described it, resembles closely the craze for imperialism that about ten years ago agitated England.  It is true, for imperialism in the time of Caesar was what has existed for the last half century in England—­a means of which one part of the historic aristocracy availed itself to keep power and renew decaying prestige, satisfying material interests and flattering with intoxications of vanity the pride of the masses.  So, too, the contesting parties in France—­the socialist, which represents the labouring classes; the radical, which represents the middle classes; the progressive and the monarchic, which represent the wealthy burghers and the aristocracy—­may discover some of their passions, their doings, their invectives, in the political warfare that troubled the age of Caesar; in those scandals, those judicial trials, in that furor of pamphlets and discourses.  This is so true, that in consequence my book met a singular fate in France; that of being adopted by each party as an argument in its own favour.  Drumont made use of it to demonstrate to France what befalls a country when it allows its national spirit to be corrupted by foreign influx, seeking to persuade his fellow-citizens that the Jews in France do the same work of intellectual and moral dissolution that the Orientals brought about in Rome.  Radical writers, like Andre Maurel, have sought arguments in my work to combat the colonial and imperialistic policy.  The imperialists also, like Pinon, have looked for arguments to support their stand-point.  Was I not merely demonstrating that the policy of expansion is a kind of universal and constant law, which periodically actualises itself through the working of the same forces, in the same ways?

It is not to be thought that the age of Caesar, so disturbed, so stormy, is our only mirror in the story of Rome.  When I write the account of the imperial society of the first and second centuries, our own time will be able to recognise even more of itself, to see what must be the future of Europe and America, if for a century or two they have no profound political and social upheavals.  In that great pax Romana lasting two centuries, we may study with special facility a phenomenon to be found in all rich civilisations cultured and relatively at peace—­the phenomenon to me the most important in contemporary European life, the feminising of all social life; that is, the victory of the feminine over the masculine spirit.  Do not fancy that the feminists, the problems and the disputes they excite in modern society, are something quite new and peculiar to us; these are only special forms of a phenomenon more general, the growing influence that woman exercises on society, as civilisation, culture, and wealth steadily increase.  Here, too, the history of Rome is luminously clear.  In it we