ed by intellectual
men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put
their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in
which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial
aptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus
and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of these
bureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weaker
with the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empire
was bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman in
statesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitan
bureaucracy of men of brains: orators, _litterati_, lawyers.
Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that the
imperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, the
formation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences of
that natural unification, the chief reason for which should be sought
in the great economic movement. The economic unification was first
and was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperial
bureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of material
interests.

After the material unity, after the political, there should have been
formed the moral and intellectual; but at this point, the forces of
Rome gave way. Rome had gathered under its sceptre too many races,
too many kinds of culture, religions too diverse; its spirit was too
exclusively political, administrative, and judicial; it could not
therefore conciliate the ideas, assimilate the customs, weld the
sentiments, unify the religions, by its laws and decrees. To this
end was necessary the power of ideas, of doctrines, of beliefs that
officials of administration could neither create nor propagate. The
work was to be accomplished outside of, and in part against, the
government. It is the work of Christianity.

Many have asked me how I shall consider Christianity in the sequence
of my work. In brief, I may say that I shall follow a different method
from that which its historians have taken up to this time: they have
studied especially how there was formed that part of Christianity
which yet lives and is the soul of it, namely, the religious doctrine.
On this account, they generally separate its history from the history
of the Empire, making of it the principal argument, considering the
history of Roman society as subordinate to it and therefore only an
appendix. I propose to reverse