Few traces of his work remain upon humanity to-day.
Caesar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to flow into Western Europe, and the sodden mass of barbarism was infused with a life-compelling current.

This was not accomplished by placing before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but by a mingling of the blood of the nations--a transfusion into Gallic veins of the germs of a higher living and thinking--thus making them heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity.
Was any human event ever fraught with such consequences to the human race as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar?
The Gallic wars had for centuries drained the treasure and taxed the resources of Rome.

Caesar conceived the audacious idea of stopping them at their source--in fact, of making Gaul a Roman province.
It was a marvellous exhibition, not simply of force, but of force wielded by supreme intelligence and craft.

He had lived many years among this people and knew their sources of weakness, their internal jealousies and rivalries, their incohesiveness.

When they hurled themselves against Rome, it was as a mass of sharp fragments.