IN THE PUBLIC MIND.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 245, 16 October 1929, Page 6

IN THE PUBLIC MIND.

THE GREATEST • ROMAN, NOT BRITISH. ' (To the Editor.) The Rev. F. Stubbs' reference to greatest Empire the sun lias ever shone m, I is totally incorrect. (I read, this sWalr my school book.) What the reverend geß ? man should have said is "Our Empire V ?" in the greatest period of the world's histoid* Compared to the Roman Empire our posit' suffers much from contrast. Two thou °!i years ago the Roman barbarians had achiml so much that we can justly call them men." I have just finished Gibbon's 4?' and Fall" and he fixes the period of the zenith at about 80 B.C. The "Mistress of tv World" tad no riv«l-in fcet th, Empire was the world. One cannot but Z filled with admiration at what had been accom plished by these primitive people. Gibbon suggests that had the empire not gone to pieo« and the ratio of progress been progress is, of course, geometrical—we wotf] to-day have been ten thousand years furth ahead. Our Empire is mostly coloured and until after the Boer War we governed tt destinies of no other white races—excepting ourselves. Living under the British fW J all have a pardonable pride in our Empire but Mr. Stubbs lias mis-stated the ca Se ' simply because he has used a slogan. Two thousand years from now the Gibbon of tiw period will refer to us as "the ignorant barbarians of 1929." There can never again be a "world" empire such as the Roman HERBERT MULVIHILL