Political development and progress

Again, if there was a power preeminently military, it was Rome; yet what is her history but the most remarkable instance of a political development and progress ? More than any power, she was able to accommodate and expand her institutions according to the circumstances of successive ages, extending her municipal privileges to the conquered cities, yielding herself to the literature of Greece, and admitting into her bosom the rites of Egypt and of Phrygia. At length, by an effort of versatility unrivalled in history, she was able to reverse one main article of her policy, and, as she had once acknowledged the intellectual supremacy of Greece, she humbled herself in a still more striking manner before a religion which she had persecuted.

Here we see the difference between a barbarian and a civilized power. In like manner, while Attila boasted that his horse’s hoof withered the grass it trod on, and Zingis could gallop over the cite of the cities he had destroyed, Seleucus, or Ptolemy, or Trajan, covered the range of their conquests with broad capitals, marts of commerce, noble roads, and spacious harbours. Lucullus collected a magnificent library in the East, and Csesar converted his northern expeditions into an antiquarian and historical research.

If these remarks upon the difference between barbarism and civilization be in the main correct, they have prepared the way for establishing the statements which I have made concerning the principle of life and the mode of dissolution proper or natural to barbarous and civilized powers respectively.

Instruments of political progress

Ratiocination and its kindred processes, which are the necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking things as we find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense. It is true, that a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible; and fix upon the mind by pure reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a bodily form. But, taking man as he is, he will be dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it arrives. Thus he will be forced back from immediate first principles to others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till, he ultimately reaches those which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself.