deed returned to Athens in company with the invading hosts of Darius. But he had probably been expelled from Athens by violent injustice; and, though attending a hostile invasion, he could not have caused it. Hardly a second case can be found in all history as a parallel to the dreadful design of Pompey, unless it be that of Count Julian calling in the Saracens to ravage Spain, and to overthrow the altars of Christianity, on the provocation of one outrage to his own house; early in the eighth century invoking a scourge that was not entirely to be withdrawn until the sixteenth. But then for Count Julian it may be pleaded-that the whole tradition is doubtful; that if true to the letter, his own provocation was enormous; and that we must not take the measure of what he meditated by the frightful consequences which actually ensued. Count Julian might have relied on the weakness of the sovereign for giving a present effect to his vengeance, but might still rely consistently enough on the natural strength of his country, when once coerced into union, for ultimately confounding the enemyand perhaps for confounding the false fanaticism itself. For the worst traitor whom history has recorded, there remains some plea of mitigation; some thing in aggravation of the wrongs which he had sustained, something in abatement of the retaliation which he designed. Only for Pompey there is none. Rome had given him no subject of complaint. It was true that the strength of Cæsar lay there; because immediate hopes from revolution be longed to democracy, to the oppressed, to the multitudes in debt, for whom the law had neglected to provide any prospect or degree of relief: and these were exactly the class of persons that could not find funds for emigrating. But still there was no overt act, no official act, no representative act, by which Rome had declared herself for either party.

Cicero was now aghast at the discoveries he made with regard to Pompey. Imbecility of purpose

distraction of counsels-feebleness in their dilatory execution-all tended to one dilemma, either that Pompey, as a mere favourite of luck, never had possessed any military talents, or that, by age and conscious inequality to his enemy, these talents were now in a state of collapse. Having first, there

The

fore, made the discovery that his too celebrated friend was any thing but a statesman, (aπonITIXalatos,) Cicero came at length to pronounce him argarnnalato-any thing but a general. But all this was nothing in the way of degradation to Pompey's character, by comparison with the final discovery of the horrid retaliation which he meditated upon all Italy, by coming back with barbarous troops to make a wilderness of the opulent land, and upon Rome in particular, by so posting his blockading fleets and his cruisers as to intercept all supplies of corn from Sicily-from the province of Africa-and from Egypt. great moral, therefore, from Cicero's confidential confessions is-that he abandoned the cause as untenable; that he abandoned the supposed party of "good men," as found upon trial to be odious intriguers-and that he abandoned Pompey in any privileged character of a patriotic leader. If he still adhered to Pompey as an individual, it was in memory of his personal obligations to that oligarch, but, secondly, for the very generous reason -that Pompey's fortunes were declining; and because Cicero would not be thought to have shunned that man in his misfortunes, whom in reality he had felt tempted to despise only for his enormous errors.

After these distinct and reiterated acknowledgments, it is impossible to find the smallest justification for the great harmony of historians in representing Cicero as having abided by those opinions with which he first entered upon the party strife. Even at that time, it is probable that Cicero's deep sense of gratitude to Pompey secretly, had entered more largely into his decision than he had ever acknowledged to himself. For he had at first exerted himself anxiously to mediate between the two parties. Now, if he really fancied the views of Cæsar to proceed on principles of destruction to the Roman constitution, all mediation was a hopeless attempt. Compromise between extremes lying so widely apart, and in fact, as between the affirmation and the negation of the same propositions, must have been too plainly impossible to have justified any countenance to so impracticable a speculation.

But was not such a compromise impossible in practice, even upon our own theory of the opposite requisitions? No.

not.

And a closer statement of the true principles concerned, will show it was The great object of the Julian party was, to heal the permanent collision between the supposed functions of the people, in their electoral capa city, in their powers of patronage, and in their vast appellate jurisdiction, with the assumed privileges of the senate. We all know how dreadful have been the disputes in our own country as to the limits of the constitutional forces composing the total state. Between the privileges of the Commons and the prerogative of the Crown, how long a time, and how severe a struggle, was required to adjust the true temperament! To say nothing of the fermenting disaffection towards the government throughout the reign of James I., and the first fifteen years of his son, the great civil war grew out of the sheer contradictions arising between the necessities of the public service and the letter of superannuated prerogatives. The simple history of that great strife was, that the democracy, the popular elements in the commonwealth, had outgrown the provisions of old usages and statutes. The king, a most conscientious man, believed that the efforts of the Commons, which represented only the instinets of rapid growth in all popular interests, cloaked a secret plan of encroachment on the essential rights of the sovereign. In this view he was confirmed by lawyers, the most dangerous of all advisers in political struggles; for they naturally seek the solution of all contested claims, either in the position and determination of ancient usage, or in the constructive view of its analogies. Whereas, here the very question was concerning a body of usage and precedent, not denied in many cases as facts, whether that condition of policy, not unreasonable as adapted to a community, having but two dominant interests, were any longer safely tenable under the rise and expansion of a third. For instance, the whole management of our foreign policy had always been reserved to the crown, as one of its most sacred mysteries, or aоLENTA; yet, if the people could obtain no indirect control of this policy, through the amplest control of the public purse, even their domestic rights might easily be made nugatory. Again, it was indispensable that the crown purse, free

VOL. LII. NO. CCCXXI.

On the

from all direct responsibility, should be checked by some responsibility, operating in a way to preserve the sovereign in his constitutional sanctity. This was finally effected by the admirable compromise-of lodging the responsibility in the persons of all servants by or through whom the sovereign could act. But this was so little understood by Charles I. as any constitutional privilege of the people, that he resented the proposal as much more insulting to himself than that of fixing the responsibility in his own person. The latter proposal he viewed as a violation of his own prerogative, founded upon open wrong. There was an injury, but no insult. other hand, to require of him the sacrifice of a servant, whose only offence had been in his fidelity to himself, was to expect that he should act collusively with those who sought to dishonour him. The absolute to el Rey of Spanish kings, in the last resort, seemed in Charles's eye indispensable to the dignity of the crown. And his legal counsellers assured him that, in conceding this point, he would degrade himself into a sort of upper constable, having some disagreeable functions, but none which could surround him with majestic attributes in the eyes of his subjects. Feeling thus, and thus advised, and religiously persuaded that he held his powers for the benefit of his people, so as to be under a deep moral incapacity to surrender "one dowle" from his royal plumage, he did right to struggle with that energy and that cost of blood which marked his own personal war from 1642 to 1645. Now, on the other hand, we know that nearly all the concessions sought from the king, and refused as mere treasonable demands, were subsequently reaffirmed, assumed into our constitutional law, and solemnly established for ever, about forty years later, by the Revolution of 1688-9. And this great event was in the nature of a compromise. For the patriots of 1642 had been betrayed into some capital errors, claims both irreconcilable with the dignity of the crown, and use. less to the people. This ought not to surprise us, and does not extinguish our debt of gratitude to those great men. Where has been the man, much less the party of men, that did not, in a first essay upon so difficult an adjustment as that of an equilibration

B

between the limits of political forces, travel into some excesses? But forty years' experience-the restoration of a party familiar with the invaluable uses of royalty, and the harmonious cooperation of a new sovereign, already trained to a system of restraints, made this final settlement as near to a perfect adjustment and compromise between all conflicting rights, as, perhaps, human wisdom could attain.

Now, from this English analogy, we may explain something of what is most essential in the Roman conflict. This great feature was common to the two cases-that the change sought by the revolutionary party was not an arbitrary change, but in the way of a natural nisus, working secretly throughout two or three generations. It was a tendency that would be denied. Just as, in the England of 1640, it is impossible to imagine that, under any immediate result whatever, ultimately the mere necessities of expansion in a people, ebullient with juvenile energies, and passing at every decennium into new stages of development, could have been gainsayed or much retarded. Had the nation embodied less of that stern political temperament, which leads eventually to extremities in action, it is possible that the upright and thoughtful character of the sovereign might have reconciled the Commons to expedients of present redress, and for twenty years the crisis might have been evaded. But the licentious character of Charles II. would inevitably have challenged the resumption of the struggle in a more embittered shape; for in the actual war of 1642, the separate resources of the crown were soon exhausted; and a deep sentiment of respect towards the king kept alive the principle of fidelity to the crown, through all the oscillations of the public mind. Under a stronger reaction against the personal sovereign, it is not absolutely impossible that the aristocracy might have come into the project of a republic. Whenever this body stood aloof, and by alliance with the church, as well as with a very large section of the democracy, their non-adhesion to republican plans finally brought them to extinction. But the principle cannot be refused that the conflict was inevitable; that the collision could in no way have been evaded; and for the same reason as spoken so loudly in Rome-because

Even in

The capital fault in the operative constitution of Rome, had long been in the antinomies, if we may be pardoned for so learned a term, of the public service. It is not so true an expression-that anarchy was always to be apprehended, as, in fact that anarchy always subsisted. What made this anarchy more and less dangerous, was the personal character of the particular man militant for the moment; next, the variable interest which such a party might have staked upon the contest; and lastly, the variable means at his disposal towards public agitation. Fortunately for the public safety, these forces, like all forces in this world of compensations and of fluctuations, obeying steady laws, rose but seldom into the excess which menaced the framework of the state. disorder, when long-continued, there is an order that can be calculated : dangers were foreseen; remedies were put into an early state of preparation. But because the evil had not been so ruinous as might have been predicted, it was not the less an evil, and it was not the less enormously increasing. The democracy retained a large class of functions, for which the original uses had been long extinct. Powers, which had utterly ceased to be available for interests of their own, were now used purely as the tenures by which they held a vested interest in bribery. The sums requisite for bribery were rising as the great estates rose. No man, even in a gentlemanly rank, no eques, no ancient noble even, unless his income were hyperbolically

vast, or unless as the creature of some party in the background, could at length face the ruin of a political career. We do not speak of men anticipating a special resistance, but of those who stood in ordinary circumstances. Atticus is not a man whom we should cite for any authority in a question of principle, for we be lieve him to have been a dissembling knave, and the most perfect vicar of Bray extant; but in a question of prudence, his example is decisive. Latterly he was worth a hundred thousand pounds. Four-fifths of this sum, it is true, had been derived from a casual bequest; however, he had been rich enough, even in early life, to present all the poor citizens of Athens-probably 12,000 familieswith a year's consumption for two individuals of excellent wheat; and he had been distinguished for other ostentatious largesses; yet this man held it to be ridiculous, in common prudence, that he should embark upon any political career. Merely the costs of an ædileship, to which he would have arrived in early life, would have swallowed up the entire hundred thousand pounds of his mature good-luck. "Honores non petiit: quod neque peti more majorum, neque capi possent, conservatis legibus, in tam effusis largitionibus; neque geri sine periculo, corruptis civitatis moribus." But this argument on the part of Atticus pointed to a modest and pacific career. When the polities of a man, or his special purpose, happened to be polemie, the costs, and the personal risk, and the risk to the public peace, were on a scale prodigiously greater. No man with such views could think of coming forward without a princely fortune, and the courage of a martyr. Milo, Curio, Decimus Brutus, and many persons beside, in a lapse of twenty-five years, spent fortunes of four and five hundred thousand pounds, and without accomplishing, after all, much of what they proposed. In other shapes, the evil was still more inalignant; and, as these circumstantial cases are the most impressive, we will bring forward a few.

I. Provincial administrations.-The Romans were not characteristically a rapacious or dishonest people the Greeks were; and it is a fact strongly illustrative of that infirmity in principle, and levity, which made the

Greeks so contemptible to the graver judgments of Rome-that hardly a trustworthy man could be found for the receipt of taxes. The regular course of business was, that the Greeks absconded with the money, unless narrowly watched. Whatever else they might be-sculptors, buffoons, dancers, tumblers-they were a nation of swindlers. For the art of fidelity in peculation, you might depend upon them to any amount. Now, amongst the Romans, these petty knaveries were generally unknown. Even as knaves they had aspiring minds; and the original key to their spoliations in the provinces, was undoubtedly the vast scale of their domestic corruption. A man who had to begin by bribing one nation, must end by fleecing another. Almost the only open channels through which a Roman nobleman could create a fortune, (always allowing for a large means of marrying to advantage, since a man might shoot a whole series of divorces, still refunding the last dowery, but still replacing it with a better,) were these two-lending money on sea-risks, or to embarrassed municipal corporations on good landed or personal security, with the gain of twenty, thirty, or even forty per cent; and secondly, the grand resource of a provincial go vernment. The abuses we need not state: the prolongation of these lieutenancies beyond the legitimate year, was one source of enormous evil; and it was the more rooted an abuse, because very often it was undeniable that other evils arose in the opposite scale from too hasty a succession of governors, upon which principle no consistency of local improvements could be ensured, nor any harmony even in the administration of justice, since each successive governor brought his own system of legal rules. As to the other and more flagrant abuses in extortion from the province, in garbling the accounts and defeating all scrutiny at Rome, in embezzlement of military pay, and in selling every kind of private advantage for bribes, these have been made notorious by the very circumstantial exposure of Verres. But some of the worst evils are still unpublished, and must be looked for in the indirect revelations of Cicero when himself a governor, as well as the incidental relations by special facts and cases. We, on our parts, will