The provinces as such were gradually to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all; the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy.

These ideas, as is well known, were not new.

The emigration from Italy to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy.

The first who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy, the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies of Carthage and Narbo.

Then the second statesman of genius produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute founded by him in Osca.