But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too easily from an accident of our education.  It is the custom in England to concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other the later Imperial.  There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe.  The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of Imperial Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative.  Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman.  The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression.  The record of that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and so appeared to those who lived under her sway.  To them the name of her empire was the ‘Roman peace’.  It was as such that the memory of it haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.

The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace.  It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more practically designed and more effectively executed.  The civilized world was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single government and a single head.  There arose then the idea of a supreme sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable condition of a world peace.  But the necessity of organization was equally grasped, insisted upon, realized.  The civilized world was covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire.  Peace through system and order—­that was the secret of the Roman success.  But two other ideas must be added to complete the explanation.  The one was the idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and exactly just.  The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties, determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the sovereign and to one another.  The notion which the Romans, not so much by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world’s stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all, issuing from and enforced by a single central power.