“No!” said I; “the horror that the prospect once gave me must not be renewed. Let us change the route, no matter how far round; the sight of that ruin would distract me to the last hour of my life.”
He only smiled in reply, and catching my bridle, galloped forward. A few seconds placed us on the summit of the hill. Could I believe my eyes! All below was as if rapine had never been there. The gardens, the cattle, the dwellings, lay a living picture under the eye.
“This is miracle!” I exclaimed.
“No; or it is but the miracle of a little activity and a great deal of good will,” was the answer of my companion. “Your kinsmen did this at the time when you were slumbering with the wolf and bear in the Libanus; Nature did her part in covering your fields and gardens; and those sheep and cattle are a tribute of gratitude from your brother for the preservation of his life.”
The Policy of Rome
Our troop now ascended the height. The land lay beneath them in the luxuriance of summer. They were ardent in their expressions of surprise and pleasure. We rushed down the defile, and I was once more master of a home. Public events had rapidly ripened in my absence.[24] Popular wrath was stimulated by increased exaction. Law was more palpably perverted into insolence. Order was giving way on all sides. The Roman garrisons, neglected and ill paid, were adopting the desperate habits of the populace, and in the general scorn of religion and right, the country was becoming a horde of robbers. The ultimate causes of this singular degeneracy might be remote and set in action by a vengeance above man; but the immediate causes were plain to every eye.
The general principles of Rome in the government of her conquests were manly and wise. When the soldier had done his work—and it was done vigorously, yet with but little violence beyond that which was essential for complete subjugation—the sword slept as an instrument of evil, and awoke only as an instrument of justice.
If neighboring kingdoms quarreled, a legion marched across the border and brought the belligerents to sudden reason; dismissed their armies to their hearths and altars, and sent the angry chiefs to reconcile their claims in an Italian dungeon. If a disputed succession threatened to embroil the general peace, the proconsul ordered the royal competitors to embark for Rome, and there settle the right before the senate.
The barbaric invasions which had periodically ravaged the Eastern empires even in their day of power were repelled with a terrible vigor. The legions left the desert covered with the tribe for the feast of the vulture, and showed to Europe the haughty leaders of the Tatar, Gothic, and Arab myriads in fetters, dragging wains, digging in mines, or sweeping the highways.
If peace could be an equivalent for freedom, the equivalent was never so amply secured. The world within this iron boundary nourished; the activity and talent of man were urged to the highest pitch; the conquered countries were turned from wastes and forests into fertility; ports were dug upon naked shores; cities swelled from villages; population spread over the soil once pestilential and breeding only the weed and the serpent. The sea was covered with trade; the pirate and the marauder were unheard of or hunted down. Commercial enterprise shot its lines and communications over the map of the earth, and regions were then familiar which even the activity of the revived ages of Europe has scarcely made known.