But it is the next and final phase of militarism which the historical apologists for war have so grossly overlooked: the phase when the best stocks of the old race are extinguished on the battlefield or enervated by the luxurious idleness which was bought by the spoils of war. Is it not proverbial how the great families which had led the invincible legions of Rome dwindled in five centuries into a sickly cluster of parasites or wholly disappeared? Is it not notorious that it was, in the first century of the present era, the healthier provincial stocks which saved Rome from destruction, or postponed its destruction? And do we not find, as time goes on, men from more and more distant provinces, in the end men from the barbaric fringes of the Empire, coming to lead its legions and support its falling eagles? All through Roman history war presents itself to the mind of the candid historian as a vampire living on the best blood of the people. Only a continuous supply of fresh blood and stout frames from the subject peoples keeps up the illusion of an "eternal Rome." It is only the shell that lasts. The people of Rome itself and of the neighbouring plains, from which the old legionaries had come, were soon exhausted. Italy in turn was exhausted and made desolate. Then Gaul and Spain and Africa, and Thrace and Dacia and the more distant provinces, were sucked bloodless and resourceless; and the great shell of an empire fell with a crash under the blows of Goth and Vandal. It is a clerical myth that Roman strength was sapped by vice. Its blood was drunk by war.
These things Niebuhr and Mommsen forgot when they proposed to Germany the splendid example of Rome; and history will have its revenge on its great interpreters by recording the close in tragedy of this new imperialism which they inspired. Other historians boldly quoted Greece--Alexander of Macedon--and the fallacy is even more piteous. Athens assuredly did not become great by war. Its most brilliant period opens after a crushing and devastating reverse, and its achievements were entirely due to its statesmen, its artists, and its thinkers. But from the moment when the shadow of the Macedonian empire fell on it, a blight came swiftly over its culture. Its glory departed for ever when it became part of a great military power. Greece, as a whole, was impoverished and ruined by war. Sparta itself, one of the most strenuous military powers that ever lived, is a classical proof that war invigorates only to destroy.