had abandoned its Gallic enterprise as it had done with Persia, after the disaster of Crassus and the failure of Antony; or suppose that Gaul had been a poor province, sterile and unpopulous, like many a Danube district; Rome could not have held out long as the seat of imperial government, just as to-day the capital of the Russian Empire could not maintain itself at Vladivostok or Harbin. It would have been necessary to move the metropolis to a richer and more populous region. That Gaul grew rich and was Romanised, changed the state of things. When Rome possessed beyond the Alps in Europe a province as large and as full of resources as Egypt; when there was the same interest in defending it as in defending Egypt, Italy was well placed to govern both. The Egypt of the Occident counterbalanced the Egypt of the Orient, and Rome, half way between, was the natural and necessary metropolis of the wide-spread Empire. Gaul alone, revived, so to speak, the Empire in the West and prevented the European provinces--even Italy itself--from becoming dead limbs safely amputable from the Oriental body. Gaul upheld Italy and Rome in Europe for three centuries longer; Gaul stopped it on the way to the Asiatic conquests run through by Alexander. Had it not been for Gaul, Asia
