swept the world in a decade, within a poor century or so were themselves swept away.  Rome, because she was only strong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest from the Spirit.  Her people were not called, like the Huns or Mongols, to be a destroyer race:  the Law designed them for builders.  But to build you must have the Balance, the proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical:  it is the one foundation.  Rome’s grand assets at the start were a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order:  grand assets indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied.  In Rome it was, largely.

To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compassion:  —­that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood, which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum nature most abhors.  You see a strong man with his ambitions:  scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will and purposes.  Prophesy direst sorrow for that man!  Nature will not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has been evolved in him.  She will give him rope; let him multiply his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is its own punishment and cure.  His selfishness sinks by its own weight to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall be the slave of his body and passions, yet keeping the old desire to excel;—­that common vice shall bring him down to the level of those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops he believed his place of old.  Then he shall be scourged with self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked Erinyes with whips of wire.  In that horrible school, struggling to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in ignominy, sorrow and shame;—­and at last shall count it all well worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no atribute, but Alaya’s self,—­Compassion.  So Karma has its ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for man.  This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.

Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion.  She loved her gravitas,—­which implied great things;—­but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things—­she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian.  But think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an essential part of government; or