So Rome passed away.  Where now is the simple soul who, while his feet were on his native soil and he asked nothing better than to hoe his cabbages and turn out yearly for patriotic throat-cuttings, was reputable—­nay, respect-worthy,—­and above all, not a little picturesque?  Alas! he is no more.—­You remember Kelly,—­lovable Kelly, who in his youth, trotting the swate ould bogs of Cohhacht, heard poetry in every sigh of the wind,—­saw the hosts of the Danaan Sidhe riding their flamey steeds through the twilight,—­listened, by the cabin peat-fire in the evenings, to tales of Finn MacCool and Cuculain and the ancient heroes and Gods of Ireland?—­Behold this very Kelly now!—­What! is this he?—­this raucous, pushing, red-haired, huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile bricklaying in Chicago;—­this ward-politician; this—­Well, well; Sic transit gloria mundi! And the Roman cad of the second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys.  He had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added to their lessons a native brutality of his own.  His feet were no longer on the Italian soil; that was nothing sacred to him now.  His moral went as his power grew.  His old tough political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal from him.  He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces, which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse than Athens of old, and by much.  The old predatory instinct was there still:  Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing influence to modify that.  But it was there minus whatever of manliness and decency had once gone with it.

Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause to the physical effect.  There are historians who will prove to you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes:  which were, in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed.  They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too much.  The secret of it all is this:  a people without the Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to assume huge responsibilities in the world.  Their qualities were not equal to the task.  The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength.  Why should it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?—­No; they are not:  because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,—­yes, even fortitude, strength of will,—­turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:—­the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it:  only the Balance is true strength.  The empires that were founded upon uncompassion, through they