still it
was founded on the idea that everything should be done by the votes of
the free people. For many years everything was done by the votes of the
free people. Under what inducements they had voted is another question.
Clients were subject to their patrons, and voted as they were told. We
have heard of that even in England, where many of us still think that
such a way of voting is far from objectionable. Perhaps compulsion was
sometimes used--a sort of "rattening" by which large bodies were driven
to the poll to carry this or the other measure. Simple eloquence
prevailed with some, and with others flattery. Then corruption became
rampant, as was natural, the rich buying the votes of the poor; and
votes were bought in various ways--by cheap food as well as by money, by
lavish expenditure in games, by promises of land, and other means of
bribery more or less overt. This was bad, of course. Every freeman
should have given a vote according to his conscience. But in what
country--the millennium not having arrived in any--has this been
achieved? Though voting in England has not always been pure, we have not
wished to do away with the votes of freemen and to submit everything to
personal rule. Nor did Cicero.

He knew that much was bad, and had himself seen many things that were
very evil. He had lived through the dominations of Marius and Sulla, and
had seen the old practices of Roman government brought down to the
pretence of traditional forms. But still, so he thought, there was life
left in the old forms, if they could be revivified by patriotism, labor,
and intelligence. It was the best that he could imagine for the
State--infinitely better than the chance of falling into the bloody
hands of one Marius and one Sulla after another. Mommsen tells us that
nothing could be more rotten than the condition of oligarchical
government into which Rome had fallen; and we are inclined to agree with
Mommsen, because we have seen what followed. But that Cicero, living and
seeing it all as a present spectator, should have hoped better things,
should not, I think, cause us to doubt either Cicero's wisdom or his
patriotism. I cannot but think that, had I been a Roman of those days, I
should have preferred Cicero, with his memories of the past, to Caesar,
with his ambition for the future.

Looking back from our standing-point of to-day, we know how great Rome
was--infinitely greater, as far as power is concerned, than anything
else