Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/78

 70 FRANCIS HAVERFIELD January Roman Britain [he said] has no history of its own. . . . Britain under the rule of the Roman Empire was merely one province, and in general an unimportant province, of a vast and complex state which stretched over three continents from the shores of ocean to the sands of the eastern seas.^ The very breadth of view with which he contemplated his subject prevented his attempting to give it isolated treatment : The fortunes of separate provinces are merged more or less completely in the movement of the mass. We can sketch the features of each or any province, its populousness, its degree of civilization, its mineral or agricul- tural or commercial wealth. We can string together in a rough narrative a few events connected with it. But we cannot write a real history of it, for it had no individual existence for the historian to trace.* For the ultimate justification of Romano-British studies he looked to the history of Rome. His views on that are best expressed in the inaugural address which he delivered to the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies four years before the outbreak of the European war : Roman history seems to me at the present day the most instructive of all histories. ... Its republican constitution offers the one true analogy to the seeming waywardness of our own English constitution. Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn. The methods by which Rome incor- porated and denationalised and assimilated more than half of its wide dominions, and the success of Rome, unintended perhaps but complete, in spreading its Graeco-Roman culture over more than a third of Europe and a part of Africa, concern in many ways our own age and Empire. Another and even vaster achievement of Rome may seem to-day less important. We knew that by desperate efforts it stayed for centuries the inrush of innumerable barbarian tribes, and that the pause insured to European civilisation not only a survival but a triumph over the invading peoples. We know also, or fancy we know, that our own civilisation is firmly planted in three continents and there is little to fear from yellow or other peril. Yet, if the European nations fall to destroying each other, such dangers may recur ; we have still to look unto the pit whence we were digged. The man who studies the Roman frontier-system studies not only a great work but one which has given us all modern western Europe.' H. H. E. Craster.
 * Victoria County History, Norfolk, i. 279.
 * Victoria County History, Northamptonshire, i. 157-8.
 * Journal of Roman Studies, voL i, pp. xviii-xix.