rvision by the supreme administrative
authority: and this the senate utterly failed to provide. It was
in this respect that the laxity and helplessness of the collegiate
government became earliest apparent. By right the governors ought to
have been subjected to an oversight far more strict and more special
than had sufficed for the administration of Italian municipal affairs;
and now, when the empire embraced great transmarine territories, the
arrangements, through which the government preserved to itself the
supervision of the whole, ought to have undergone a corresponding
expansion. In both respects the reverse was the case. The governors
ruled virtually as sovereign; and the most important of the
institutions serving for the latter purpose, the census of the empire,
was extended to Sicily alone, not to any of the provinces subsequently
acquired. This emancipation of the supreme administrative officials
from the central authority was more than hazardous. The Roman
governor, placed at the head of the armies of the state, and in
possession of considerable financial resources: subject to but a
lax judicial control, and practically independent of the supreme
administration; and impelled by a sort of necessity to separate the
interest of himself and of the people whom he governed from that of
the Roman community and to treat them as conflicting, far more
resembled a Persian satrap than one of the commissioners of the Roman
senate at the time of the Samnite wars. The man, moreover, who had
just conducted a legalized military tyranny abroad, could with
difficulty find his way back to the common civic level, which
distinguished between those who commanded and those who obeyed, but
not between masters and slaves. Even the government felt that their
two fundamental principles--equality within the aristocracy, and the
subordination of the power of the magistrates to the senatorial
college--began in this instance to give way in their hands. The
aversion of the government to the acquisition of new provinces and to
the whole provincial system; the institution of the provincial
quaestorships, which were intended to take at least the financial
power out of the hands of the governors; and the abolition of the
arrangement--in itself so judicious--for a longer tenure of such
offices,(36) very clearly evince the anxiety felt by the more far-
seeing of the Roman statesmen as to the fruits of the seed thus sown.
But diagnosis is n