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should be an army of salaried officials of municipalities living in their midst. In this country we might perhaps expect to avoid the corruption, the financial tyranny, and the dishonesty which, on the other side of the Atlantic, have tended to enrich a few privileged and unscrupulous individuals at the expense of the public. We could scarcely hope to escape the evils inseparable from 'dressing' a huge number of persons in a little brief authority over the business relations and even the social life of their neighbours. On the Continent our friends, and still more their guests, have long groaned under the small despotisms exercised by municipalities and their officers. But their powers are wielded in matters of government, not in matters of trade. In the United Kingdom people would not stand being dragooned by regiments of uniformed officials when purchasing necessaries or moving from place to place. From any such risk competition frees them now. It would no longer do so were there to be a very wide extension of municipal monopolies. The petty but very irritating friction even now produced by the temptation to abuse authority, to which officers of railway companies and other large industrial undertakings are prone to yield, would be gravely increased were the authority wielded by officers not of private companies, but public authorities. The difficulty of dealing with labour disputes would be greatly enhanced, and the value of municipal administration seriously impaired, were a large body of municipal electors in a position to use their votes for personal rather than public considerations.

All that we have said points to the extreme desirability of the reappointment of Lord Crewe's Committee next year. This will now have to be the work of a new Parliament, and there may become necessary some changes in the personnel of the Committee, which may be a subject of regret, but need not materially impair the value of a report. We cannot too firmly insist on the proposition the truth of which Sir Henry Fowler himself asserted. An inquiry into municipal trading is neither directly nor indirectly an attack upon our municipal institutions. What it may lead to is the establishment of wise and temperate conditions regulating the grant of powers, and affecting the area within which they should be exercised, as well as the subject-matters with which they should deal. To the determination of such conditions the most staunch friend of municipal institutions need not object. No one denies what Sir Henry Fowler described as the rare advantages of the devotion, wise supervision, and

experienced management of the large array of citizens who work our local administration. But the truest admirers of that large army must admit that there are limits to the value and efficiency of their work, and cannot desire to extend it indefinitely. The sphere of usefulness of our great boroughs is sufficient to satisfy the ambition of even the most energetic lord mayor, mayor, or town-clerk. But neither those functionaries nor the country wish to see a system of bureaucratic influence built up which would tend to paralyse individual enterprise and remove inducements to that investment of capital and skill by private persons to which our Empire is so largely indebted for the extent of its commerce and the magnitude of its resources.

ART. VII.-1. Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul.
HOLMES. London: Macmillan, 1899.
2. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

By T. RICE

Vol. XIII. Edidit

O. HIRSCHFELD. Berlin: Reimer, 1899.

3. Caesars Rheinfestung. Von H. NISSEN und C. KOENEN. Bonn Verein von Altertumsfreunden, 1899.

4. The Romans on the Riviera and the Rhone. By W. H. (BULLOCK) HALL. London: Macmillan, 1898.

5. La Religion des Gaulois, les Druides et le Druidisme. Par A. BERTRAND. Paris: Leroux, 1897.

THE

HE Italian statesman Machiavelli, in his 'Prince,' makes some curious and suggestive remarks on the best methods of making and maintaining a conquest. The theme has not often been pursued since his day; during the last half-century in particular, men have preferred other and pleasanter aspects of history than that afforded by wars and national catastrophes. But the experiences of conquering peoples are neither dull nor unimportant, and the various forms of conquest may occupy the reader with at least as much propriety as the various forms of individual slavery. Two of these forms of conquest are well enough known to modern men. To us in England the most familiar is the conquest effected by civilised white men over uncivilised Africans or Asiatics who seem to be separated from their conquerors not only by the degree of their civilisation, but even more by a broad distinction of race. Such conquests, we know, are often successful, permanent, and accepted by the conquered, but they do not and perhaps cannot result in the fusion of conquered and conqueror. To the continental European, on the other hand, the word conquest denotes rather the conquest of civilised white men by civilised white men, followed, as experience bitterly proves, by the persistent hatred of Pole for Russian or southern Slav for Magyar.

We desire to consider here a third and different form of conquest, the conquest of uncivilised by civilised Europeans where no racial gulf irremediably sunders the conquered and the conquerors, and the difference in civilisation can therefore become obliterated by the assimilation of the one to the other. No instance of such a conquest has occurred in recent times. The peoples of Europe the white races as we style them-have all long since attained a greater or less

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degree of civilisation, and if they were now to conquer one
another, their conquest would resemble the conquest of
Poland. But we can find instances in antiquity, and we
have several in the history of the Roman Empire. The
extension of that Empire over western and central Europe
was, in fact, the conquest by civilised Italians of uncivilised
Gauls and Spaniards and Germans and Dacians who were
not far removed racially from their conquerors. They
possessed at least the one thing needful, the capacity to
develope in conformity to the civilised Italian type; they
became in the end as Roman as the Romans. We propose
in the following paragraphs to trace one of these conquests,
the conquest of Gaul-that is, France and western Germany.
Part of the story is familiar to everyone.
Et nos ergo

manum ; we have all misconstrued Cæsar in our time,
fourteen lines a lesson. But we will now stretch the tale out
further, beginning at the first annexation sixty years before
Cæsar's campaigns, and continuing on till the settlement of
Gaul under the early Empire.

The period in which Rome commenced her definite occupation of Gaulish soil is curious and remarkable, and historians have not always described it well. It is best known as the age of the Gracchi, when, as we are usually told, the internal energy and external power of Rome were alike visibly declining, and the very existence of the State was endangered by convulsive efforts at reform. The men who lived at the time would perhaps have put it otherwise. The sixty years from about B.c. 160 to B.c. 100, in the middle of which the elder Gracchus rose and fell, were years for Rome of immense and real expansion. It was an expansion in one definite direction-commercial and capitalist. The dominant senatorial oligarchy combined with the great traders-merchants, money-lenders, slave-dealers to carry out a policy of wide external aggrandisement which immediately enriched politician and trader alike. At the opening of this half-century Rome possessed four provinces' outside of Italy; five were now added and were filled at once with a crowd of Romans. Senators held the lucrative governorships or speculated in the vast estates which in the course of annexation became confiscated to the Roman People; merchants pushed their wares and money-lenders forced their loans on unhappy tribute-paying natives. Within these provinces Roman commerce had a monopoly ; to secure that more effectively, Rome's commercial rivals were ruthlessly crushed. Carthage and Corinth were

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annihilated, and Rhodes, the third great trading city of the Mediterranean, was ruined indirectly, since, as an old ally of Rome, she could not decently be destroyed by force. The island of Delos, once the home of Apollo, was selected by the Roman government as the centre for Roman traders in the East, and endowed with the privileges of a free port. It became rapidly the greatest slave-mart in the then world, and its ruins, lately excavated by French archaeologists, testify to its prosperity and wealth. Other measures were taken. A new currency was introduced to facilitate direct intercourse between Rome and the Levant; roads were constructed in Italy and in the provinces, and expansion was visible on all sides. No doubt the period had another side. Ominous signs were showing themselves in Italy-decay of agriculture, distress among the rural population, political discontent among the Italians who had not the Roman franchise, lack of recruits, growth of estates worked by slavelabour on the plantation system. Abroad, too, the administration of the rapidly enlarging empire was causing difficulty. Governors and generals, chosen by social rank and not by merit, were found to be incapable or dishonest, and the military history of the period is not without its scandals. But these evils were slightly felt at first; their full seriousness lay in the future. For the moment the period was one of vast commercial expansion, and to it, and indeed to the latter half of it, we owe the first Roman conquest of Gaul, commenced in B.C. 118.

Roman armies had, of course, been seen in Gaul long before this date. They had gone there in the vain attempt to stop Hannibal. They had fought, later on, with the Ligurian hill-tribes, along the Riviera. They had helped Massilia, the old Greek city allied with Rome, to defend herself and her dominions against the natives, and it was this last errand which led immediately to the annexation. A short series of successful campaigns by Roman troops on behalf of Massilia ended in the establishment of a Roman province. Massilia itself remained independent and kept its territory, the coast from the Maritime Alps to the Rhone; the Romans apparently thought it useless trouble to administer this district themselves when they could leave it to be governed in their interest by their Massiliot allies. But the rest of the coast, from the Rhone to the Pyrenees, was constituted a Roman province, called, after its capital Narbo, Gallia Narbonensis. There was some military advantage in the step, for it helped, as Mr. Holmes observes,

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