DOING AS THE ROMANS DID.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19199, 16 June 1924, Page 10

DOING AS THE ROMANS DID.

Watch the career of Mussolini (says an English writer), and it will be discovered that most of his policy grows naturally out of the parent stem of the old Roman Empire. It is quite a mistake to regard him as revolutionary; ail he has done is to begin making history at the point where Trajan left off. It is not, difficult, amid the living remains of the classical epoch in Rome, to regard the troublous intervening years between, say, 324 and 1914, as a mere series of experiments that have failed. Free Learning for Foreigners.— The latest move of the Italian Prime Minister is thoroughly in the classic Homan tradition. Mussolini has decreed that foreign students entering Italian schools, universities, and schools of fine arts are to pay no fees, and has caused his Government to establish a fund for providing allowances for foreigners desiring to study in Italian schools. Rome conquered her empire less by arms than by giving Roman culture to all who lived under her rule. Roman civilisation was treated by classical Italians as the greatest good to which a man could attain, and this attitude, enthusiastically maintained by her nativeborn soldiers, citizens, and traders all over the then known world, very naturally resulted in a great demand on the part of foreigners for a Roman education. This demand was generously met. French history might have been very different if the Gauls of Provincia, become Gallo-Roman to their finger-tips, had valued their adopted Roman culture less and the political freedom of the Gaulish race more. They preferred the intellectual and artistic fleshpots of provincial Rome to the certainty of hardship and the risk of defeat with Vercingetorix in the field. It was a catastrophe for Gaulish nationalism ; but it was a triumph for the colonising policy of Rome. What a Man Learns at School.— Modern young China goes to school in America. Ten, 20 years hence the United States and not the British Empire will be the dominant cultural and commercial influence in the United States of. China, just as United States Republican institutions and ideals for many generations have replaced the earlier Continental culture and influence in Ireland. Mussolini and his disciplined Bundles of Youth dream no idle dream of a Roman renaissance. They are taking the practical steps best calculated to spread Italian culture once more over the face of the known world.