o, quote one passage from the work: "Let those who, like
De Quincey,[26] Mommsen, and others, speak disparagingly of Cicero, and
are so lavish in praise of Caesar, recollect that Caesar never was
troubled by a conscience." Here it is that we find that advance almost
to Christianity of which I have spoken, and that superiority of mind
being which makes Cicero the most fit to be loved of all the Romans.

It is hard for a man, even in regard to his own private purposes, to
analyze the meaning of a conscience, if he put out of question all
belief in a future life. Why should a man do right if it be not for a
reward here or hereafter? Why should anything be right--or wrong? The
Stoics tried to get over the difficulty by declaring that if a man could
conquer all his personal desires he would become, by doing so, happy,
and would therefore have achieved the only end at which a man can
rationally aim. The school had many scholars, but probably never a
believer. The normal Greek or Roman might be deterred by the law, which
means fear of punishment, or by the opinion of his neighbors, which
means ignominy. He might recognize the fact that comfort would combine
itself with innocence, or disease and want with lust and greed. In this
there was little need of a conscience--hardly, perhaps, room for it. But
when ambition came, with all the opportunities that chance, audacity,
and intellect would give--as it did to Sylla, to Caesar, and to
Augustus--then there was nothing to restrain the men. There was to such
a man no right but his power, no wrong but opposition to it. His cruelty
or his clemency might be more or less, as his conviction of the utility
of this or that other weapon for dominating men might be strong with
him. Or there might be some variation in the flowing of the blood about
his heart which might make a massacre of citizens a pleasing diversion
or a painful process to him; but there was no conscience. With the man
of whom we are about to speak conscience was strong. In his sometimes
doubtful wanderings after political wisdom--in those mental mazes which
have been called insincerity--we shall see him, if we look well into his
doings, struggling to find whether, in searching for what was his duty,
he should go to this side or to that. Might he best hope a return to
that state of things which he thought good for his country by adhering
to Caesar or to Pompey? We see the workings of his conscience, and, as we
remember that S