Its cities might be pillaged,
its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it
was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth,
and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic
life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly
slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates.
The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the
prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria,
on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by
London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most
interesting subject of study.
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