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 with no principle of union or assimilative power, and with no real vitality or possibility of endurance. The Roman Empire was on a far higher plane, and had a far higher mission. Bound together not only by a common ruler, but by a highly organized and uniform though elastic system of administration, and as time went on by a common system of law and a common citizenship, it became the most powerful engine of assimilation that the world has ever seen. In the first instance, indeed, Roman Imperialism was little more than an Imperialism of conquest; but it was a conquest that ultimately justified itself as a furtherance to civilization. Historically, the Roman dominion served the purpose of breaking down the barriers of tribe, and race, and city, that separated the various peoples round the shores of the Mediterranean; in widening their horizons, hitherto restricted in a degree which it is difficult for us to realize or understand; in drawing to a focus all the scattered elements of civilization in the ancient world; in evolving for mankind a universal system of jurisprudence; in preparing their minds for the acceptance of a universal religion. In the sense that it united so many diverse elements under the shelter of a common Government, and that it transcended so many forms of polity with its all-embracing organization, the Roman Empire was universal It was not merely one mighty State surrounded by others similar in kind, though towering above them, but the one and only civilized State beyond whose bounds there was a mere welter of barbarism. In this way the idea of universality, of catholicity, came to be associated with the word Empire, and for more than a thousand years remained inseparable from its meaning; and, though in our own days the word has sometimes been put to strange and degraded uses, there is more than a suggestion of that idea clinging to it still.