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Ancient and Modern Methods of Empire 315this central life faded that the pressure of the barbarian worldwithout, to which its ruin is wrongly attributed, could prevailover its magnificent solidarity.The Roman effected his sway by military conquest and militarycolonisation; but once that conquest was assured, he wasnot content with holding it together as an artificial politicalunity, nor did he trust solely to that political convenience ofa good, efficient and well-organised government economicallyand administratively beneficent which made it at first acceptableto the conquered peoples. He had too sure a political instinct tobe so easily satisfied; for it is certain that if he had stopped shortthere, the empire would have broken up at a much earlier date.The peoples under his sway would have preserved their sense ofseparate nationality and, once accustomed to Roman efficiencyand administrative organisation, would inevitably have tendedto the separate enjoyment of these advantages as independentorganised nations. It was this sense of separate nationality whichthe Roman rule succeeded in blotting out wherever it establishedits own dominant influence. And this was done not by the stupidexpedient of a brutal force after the Teutonic fashion, but by apeaceful pressure. Rome first compounded with the one rivalculture that was superior in certain respects to her own andaccepted it as part of her own cultural existence and even asits most valuable part; she created a Graeco-Roman civilisation,left the Greek tongue to spread and secure it in the East,but introduced it everywhere else by the medium of the Latinlanguage and a Latin education and succeeded in peacefullyovercoming the decadent or inchoate cultures of Gaul and herother conquered provinces. But since even this process mightnot have been sufficient to abolish all separatist tendency, shenot only admitted her Latinised subjects to the highest militaryand civil offices and even to the imperial purple, so that withinless than a century after Augustus, first an Italian Gaul and thenan Iberian Spaniard held the name and power of the Caesars,but she proceeded rapidly enough to deprive of all vitality andthen even nominally to abolish all the grades of civic privilegewith which she had started and extended the full Roman citizen-