eneficence can accompany such a
form of government. For all temporary sleekness, for metropolitan
comfort and fatness, the bill has to be paid sooner or later in
ignorance, poverty, and oppression. With an oligarchy there will be
other, perhaps graver, faults; but with an oligarchy there will be salt,
though it be among a few. There will be a Cicero now and again--or at
least a Cato. From the dead, stagnant level of personal despotism there
can be no rising to life till corruption paralyzes the hands of power,
and the fabric falls by its own decay Of this no proof can be found in
the world's history so manifest as that taught by the Roman Empire.

I think it is made clear by a study of Cicero's life and works, up to
the period of his exile, that an adhesion to the old forms of the Roman
Government was his guiding principle. I am sure that they who follow me
to the close of his career will acknowledge that after his exile he
lived for this principle, and that he died for it. "Respublica," the
Republic, was the one word which to his ear contained a political charm.
It was the shibboleth by which men were to be conjured into well-being.
The word constitution is nearly as potent with us. But it is essential
that the reader of Roman history and Roman biography should understand
that the appellation had in it, for all Roman ears, a thoroughly
conservative meaning. Among those who at Cicero's period dealt with
politics in Rome--all of whom, no doubt, spoke of the Republic as the
vessel of State which was to be defended by all persons--there were four
classes. These were they who simply desired the plunder of the
State--the Catilines, the Sullas of the day, and the Antonys; men such
as Verres had been, and Fonteius, and Autronius. The other three can be
best typified each by one man. There was Caesar, who knew that the
Republic was gone, past all hope. There was Cato--"the dogmatical fool
Cato" as Mommsen calls him, perhaps with some lack of the historian's
dignity--who was true to the Republic, who could not bend an inch, and
was thus as detrimental to any hope of reconstruction as a Catiline or a
Caesar. Cicero was of the fourth class, believing in the Republic, intent
on saving it, imbued amid all his doubts with a conviction that if the
"optimates" or "boni"--the leading men of the party--would be true to
themselves, Consuls, Censors, and Senate would still suffice to rule the
world; but prepared to give and take with those