all elements
existing in the constitution from an early day, and already developed
in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, which
retained to the last the senate and consuls, though with less and less
practical power. These changes are very great, but are none of them
radical, dating from the recognition of the plebs as pertaining to the
Roman people. They are normal developments, not corruptions, and the
transition from the consular republic to the imperial was
unquestionably a real social and political progress. And yet the Roman
people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the
developments of their constitution. There was Providence in the course
of events, but no fatalism.

Sulla was a true patrician, a blind partisan of the past. He sought to
arrest the plebeian development led by Marius, and to restore the
exclusively patrician government. But it was too late. His
proscriptions, confiscations, butcheries, unheard-of cruelties which
anticipated and surpassed those of the French Revolution of 1793,
availed nothing. The Marian or plebeian movement, apparently checked
for a moment, resumed its march with renewed vigor under Julius, and
triumphed at Pharsalia. In vain Cicero, only accidentally associated
with the patrician party, which distrusted him--in vain Cicero
declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and
Cassius seize the assassin's dagger, and strike to the earth "the
foremost man of all the world;" the plebeian cause moves on with
resistless force, triumphs anew at Philippi, and young Octavius avenges
the murder of his uncle, and proves to the world that the assassination
of a ruler is a blunder as well as a crime. In vain does Mark Antony
desert the movement, rally Egypt and the barbaric East, and seek to
transfer the seat of empire from the Tiber to the banks of the Nile or
the Orontes; plebeian and imperial Rome wins a final victory at Actium,
and definitively secures the empire of the civilized world to the West.

Thus far the developments were normal, and advanced civilization. But
Rome still retained the barbaric element of slavery in her bosom, and
had conquered more barbaric nations than she had assimilated. These
nations she at first governed as tributary states, with their own
constitutions and national chiefs; afterwards as Roman provinces, by
her own proconsuls and prefects. When the emperors threw open the gates
of the ci