90 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



mountain fastnesses held the world away, and selection chose the best 

 and for the best purposes, casting aside the weakling, and the slave, 

 holding the man for the man's work, and ever the man's work was at 

 home, building the cities, subduing the forests, draining the marshes, 

 adjusting the customs and statutes, preparing for tlie new generations. 

 So the men begat sons of men after their own fashion, and the men of 

 strength and courage were ever dominant. The Spirit of Freedom 

 is a wise master ; he cares wisely for all that he controls. 



So in the early days, when Romans were men, when Rome was small, 

 without glory, without riches, without colonies and without slaves, these 

 were the days of Roman greatness. 



Then the Spirit of Freedom little by little gave way to the Spirit of 

 Domination. Conscious of power, men sought to exercise it, not on 

 themselves but on one another. Little by little, this meant banding 

 together, aggression, suppression, plunder, struggle, glory and all that 

 goes with the pomp and circumstance of war. The individuality of 

 men was lost in the aggrandizement of the few. Independence was 

 swallowed up in ambition, patriotism came to have a new meaning. It 

 was transferred from the hearth and home to the trail of the army. 



It does not matter to us now what were the details of the subse- 

 quent history of Rome. We have now to consider only a single factor. 

 In science, this factor is known as " reversal of selection." " Send forth 

 the best ye breed ! " That was the word of the Roman war-call. And 

 the spirit of domination took these words literally, and the best were 

 sent forth. In the conquests of Rome, Vir, the real man, went forth to 

 battle and to the work of foreign invasion ; Homo, the human being, re- 

 mained on the farm and in the workshop and begat the new generations. 

 Thus " Vir gave place to Homo." The sons of real men gave places to 

 the sons of scullions, stable-boys, slaves, camp-followers and the riff- 

 raff of those the great victorious army did not want. 



The fall of Rome was not due to luxury, effeminacy, corruption, 

 the wickedness of Nero and Caligula, the weakness of the train of Con- 

 stantine's worthless descendants. It was fixed at Philippi, when the 

 spirit of domination was victorious over the spirit of freedom. It was 

 fixed still earlier, in the rise of consuls and triumvirates and the fall of 

 the simple, sturdy, self-sufficient race who would brook no arbitrary 

 ruler. When the real men fell in war, or were left in far-away colonies, 

 the life of Rome still went on. But it was a different type of Roman 

 which continued it, and this new type repeated in Roman history its 

 weakling parentage. 



Thus we read in Roman history of the rise of the mob and of the em- 

 peror wh6.5i8 the mob's exponent. It is not the presence of the emperor 

 which makes imperialism. It is the absence of the people, the want of 

 men. Babies in their day have been emperors. A wooden image would 



