rsonality of infinite
tact; and _that_ he possessed. He was the kind of man everybody
could like; that put everyone at ease; that was friendly and
familiar in all sorts of society; so he could make that
treacherous quagmire Rome stable enough to be his _pied-a-terre._
That done, he could stretch out his arms thence to the provinces,
and begin to weld them into unity. For this was the second
part and real aim of his work: to rouse up in the Empire a
centripetalism, with Rome for center, before centripetalism, in
Rome itself, should have given place to the centrifugal forces of
national death.

Rome ruled the world, and Augustus Rome, by right of conquest;
and that is the most precarious right of all, and must always
vanish with a change in the cycles. He had to, and did,
transmute it into a stable right: first with respect to his own
standing in Rome,--which might be done, with _tact_ for weapon,--
in a few years; then with respect to Rome's standing in the
world,--which could not be done in less than a couple of
lifetimes, and with the best of good government as means. If
the work should be interrupted too early it would all fall to
pieces. So then he must have one successor at least, a soul of
standing equal to his own: one that could live and reign until
37 A.D. Let the Empire until that year be ruled continuously
from Rome in such a manner as to rouse up Roman--that is, World,
--patriotism in all its provinces, and the appearance of the
Crest-Wave in a new center would not be the signal for a new
break-up of the world. The problem was, then, to find the man
able to do this.

The child: for he must not be a man yet. And seeing what was at
stake, he must be better equipped than Augustus: he must be
trained from childhood by Augustus. Because he was to work in
the midst of much more difficult conditions. Augustus had real
men to help him: the successor probably would have none. When
the Crest-Wave struck it, Rome was already mean and corrupt and
degenerate. Augustus, not without good human aid, might hope to
knock it into some kind of decency during the apex-time of the
thirteen decades. His reign would fall, roughly, in the third
quarter of the cycle, which is the best time therein; but his
successor would have to hold out through the last quarter, which
is the very worst. The Crest-Wave would then be passing from
Italy: Rome would be becoming ever a harder place for a Real Man
to live and