Jus, Imperium, Pax

In a driving rain, at Britain's seacoast town of Deal, the Mayor and a handful of raincoated freemen gathered to pay solemn tribute to a conqueror. The occasion : the unveiling of a memorial tablet to Julius Caesar on the 2,000th anniversary of his invasion.

The London Times also delivered itself of some occasional thoughts: "Britain, as much as any nation of the modern world, has learned the Roman lesson and followed in the Roman path. It may be fanciful to imagine that any afflatus of high statesmanship passed from Caesar to his noble and valiant adversary Cassivellaunus, or that by any mystical communion a spark of the Virgilian light of empire was tended through the centuries in Merlin's cave. Yet somehow the grand ideals of Roman dominion have not been lost in the modern world: jus, the conception of a law that should transcend the limitations of the small people who first conceived it, and become at last the guarantor of justice to all sorts and conditions of men; imperium, the principle of a dominion that can enable all manner of races, languages and faiths to live together within the bounds of a single system of ordered rule, and of a citizenship that, though it may begin as the privilege of a governing race, will gradually be extended until it is enjoyed by all; and pax, the product of the other two, the belief in the mission of imperial government, based evenly upon the foundations of justice and national authority, to bring in the golden age when war shall cease from the earth.

"Jus Romanum, Imperium Romanum, Pax Romana--by changing the adjective Britain has given to each of them a changed flavor and connotation. But that is only because the tradition at the heart of them is a living thing, and grows continually. After two thousand years an imperial people can with a clear title claim its spiritual ancestry."

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