banks it lay, flowed down to an almost unknown coast, that no Greek or Phoenician ship had ever touched, save by chance; was it through her situation that Rome became the mistress of the world? No sooner did the whole world lie at the feet of the Roman eagles, than the central government found that its capital was ill-placed; and the long series of insults to the eternal city began. The early emperors had their eyes turned towards Greece, and nearly always lived there. When Tiberius was in Italy he stayed at Capri, a point facing the two halves of the empire. His successors went to Antioch. Some of them, in view of the importance of Gaul, went as far north as Treves. Finally, an edict took away even the title of chief city from Rome and conferred it on Milan. If the Romans made some stir in the world, it was certainly in spite of the position of the district from which their first armies issued forth.
Coming down to modern history I am overwhelmed by the multitude of facts that support my theory. I see prosperity suddenly leaving the Mediterranean coasts, a clear proof that it was not inseparably attached to them. The great commercial cities of the Middle Ages grew up in places where no political philosopher of an earlier time would have thought of founding them. Novgorod rose in the midst of an ice-bound land; Bremen on a coast almost as cold. The Hanseatic towns in the centre of Germany were built in regions plunged, as it seemed, in immemorial slumber. Venice emerged from a deep gulf in the Adriatic. The balance of political power was shifted to places scarcely heard of before, but now gleaming with a new splendour. In France the whole strength was concentrated to the north of the Loire, almost beyond the Seine. Lyons, Toulouse, Narbonne, Marseilles, and Bordeaux fell from the high dignity to which they had been called by the Romans. It was Paris that became the important city, Paris, which was too far from the sea for purposes of trade, and which would soon prove too near to escape the invasions of the Norman pirates. In Italy, towns formerly of the lowest rank became greater than the city of the
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