Nor will it be denied, I suppose, that Niebuhr is right when he observes, that the advantage to Rome of having conquered Sicily, as to power and national vigor, was undeniable.

But even if it were not so, are there no other advantages to be secured?
No human mind is vast enough to comprehend in one glance, nor is any human life long enough to follow out consecutively, all the immeasurable blessings and the unspeakable good which have resolved to mankind from the ever-memorable victories of little Greece over the rolling masses of servile Asia, which were nigh sweeping over Europe like the high tides of a swollen sea, carrying its choking sand over all the germs of civilization, liberty, and taste, and nearly all that is good and noble.

Think what we should have been had Europe become an Asiatic province, and the Eastern principles of power and stagnation should have become deeply infused into her population, so that no process ever after could have thrown it out again! Has no advantage resulted from the Hebrews declining any longer to be ground in the dust, and ultimately annihilated, at least mentally so, by stifling servitude, and the wars which followed their resolution?
The Netherlands war of independence has had a penetrating and decided effect upon modern history, and, in the eye of all who value the most substantial parts and elementary ideas of modern and civil liberty, a highly advantageous one, both directly and through Great Britain.

Wars have frequently been, in the hands of Providence, the means of disseminating civilization, if carried on by a civilized people--as in the case of Alexander, whose wars had a most decided effect upon the intercourse of men and extension of civilization--or of rousing and reuniting people who had fallen into lethargy, if attacked by less civilized and numerous hordes.

Frequently we find in history that the ruder and victorious tribe is made to recover as it were civilization, already on the wane with a refined nation.