pt, he, too, is dead, and Caesar stands alone, master of Rome and of
the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them
that struck him died a natural death.

Creation presupposes chaos, and it is the divine prerogative of genius
to evolve order from confusion. Julius Caesar found the world of his day
consisting of disordered elements of strength, all at strife with each
other in a central turmoil, skirted and surrounded by the relative peace
of an ancient and long undisturbed barbarism.

It was out of these elements that he created what has become modern
Europe, and the direction which he gave to the evolution of mankind has
never wholly changed since his day. Of all great conquerors he was the
least cruel, for he never sacrificed human life without the direct
intention of benefiting mankind by an increased social stability. Of all
great lawgivers, he was the most wise and just, and the truths he set
down in the Julian Code are the foundation of modern justice. Of all
great men who have leaped upon the world as upon an unbroken horse, who
have guided it with relentless hands, and ridden it breathless to the
goal of glory, Caesar is the only one who turned the race into the track
of civilization and, dying, left mankind a future in the memory of his
past. He is the one great man of all, without whom it is impossible to
imagine history. We cannot take him away and yet leave anything of what
we have. The world could have been as it is without Alexander, without
Charlemagne, without Napoleon; it could not have been the world we know
without Caius Julius Caesar.

That fact alone places him at the head of mankind.

In Caesar's life there is the same matter for astonishment as in
Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and
climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous
magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the
impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and
how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in
politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century
to be the world's conqueror, lawgiver and civilizer. The daily miracle
of genius is the incalculable speed at which it simultaneously thinks
and acts. Nothing is so logical as creation, and creation is the first
sign as well as the only proof that genius is present.

Hitherto the life of Caesar has not been logically p