to prosperity and happiness on earth by the development of superior
physical force and the destruction of all rivals. Cato the Censor was the
typical Roman landowner, the type of the class which built up the great
vested interest in land which always moved and dominated Rome. He
expressed the Roman ideal in his famous declaration in the Senate, when he
gave his vote for the Third Punic War; "_Delenda est Carthago_," Carthage
must be destroyed. And Carthage was destroyed because to a Roman to
destroy Carthage was a logical competitive necessity. Subsequently, the
Romans took the next step in their social adjustment at home. They deified
the energy which had destroyed Carthage. The incarnation of physical force
became the head of the State;--the Emperor when living, the Divus, when
dead. And this conception gained expression in the law. This godlike
energy found vent in the Imperial will; "_Quod principi placuit, legis
habet vigorem_." [Footnote: Inst. l, 2, 6.]

Nothing could be more antagonistic to the Mosaic philosophy, which invoked
the supernatural unity as authority for every police regulation. Moreover,
the Romans carried out their principle relentlessly, to their own
destruction. That great vested interest which had absorbed the land of
Italy, and had erected the administrative entity which policed it, could
not hold and cultivate its land profitably, in competition with other
lands such as Egypt, North Africa, or Assyria, which were worked by a
cheaper and more resistant people. Therefore the Roman landowners imported
this competitive population from their homes, having first seized them as
slaves, and cultivated their own Italian fields with them after the
eviction of the original native peasants, who could not survive on the
scanty nutriment on which the eastern races throve. [Footnote: I have
dealt with this subject at length in my _Law of Civilization and
Decay_, chapter II, to which I must refer the reader. More fully still
in the French translation. "This unceasing emigration gradually changed