ession, the executioner's axe following
the conscious thought as its unconscious instrument. Sulla carried
out that part with rare, in fact superhuman, perfection; but within
the limits which it laid down for him, his working was not only
grand but even useful. Never has any aristocracy deeply decayed
and decaying still farther from day to day, such as was the Roman
aristocracy of that time, found a guardian so willing and able as
Sulla to wield for it the sword of the general and the pen of the
legislator without any regard to the gain of power for himself.
There is no doubt a difference between the case of an officer who
refuses the sceptre from public spirit and that of one who throws it
away from a cloyed appetite; but, so far as concerns the total absence
of political selfishness--although, it is true, in this one respect
only--Sulla deserves to be named side by side with Washington.

Value of the Sullan Constitution

But the whole country--and not the aristocracy merely--was more
indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess. Sulla
definitely terminated the Italian revolution, in so far as it was
based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts
as compared with others of better rights, and, by compelling himself
and his party to recognize the equality of the rights of all
Italians in presence of the law, he became the real and final
author of the full political unity of Italy--a gain which was
not too dearly purchased by ever so many troubles and streams
of blood. Sulla however did more. For more than half a century
the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her
permanent condition: for the government of the senate with the
Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and
Carbo was a yet far worse illustration of the absence of a master-
hand (the sad image of which is most clearly reflected in that
equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most
uncertain, most intolerable, and most mischievous of all
conceivable political conditions--in fact the beginning of the
end. We do not go too far when we assert that the long-undermined
Roman commonwealth must have necessarily fallen to pieces, had not
Sulla by his intervention in Asia and Italy saved its existence.
It is true that the constitution of Sulla had as little endurance
as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his
structure was no solid one; but it is arrant