he
twilight it was. We talk of representative government; as
if any government were ever really anything else. Men get
the government that represents them; that represent their
intelligence, or their laxity, or their vices:--whether it be
sent in by the ballot or by a Praetorian Guard with their caprice
and spears. In a pralayic time there is no keen national
consciousness, no centripetalism. There was none in Rome in
those days; or not enough to counteract the centrifugalism that
simply did not care. The empire held together, because Augustus
and Tiberius had created a centripetalism in the provinces; and
these continued in the main through it all to enjoy the good
government the first two emperors had made a tradition in them,
and felt but little the hands of the fools or madmen reigning in
Rome. And then, blood from the provinces was always flowing into
Rome itself; particularly in the Flavian time; and supplied or
fed a new centripetalism there which righted things in the next
half-cycle. It was Rome, not the provinces, that Nero and
Caligula represented in their day; the time was transitional;
you may call Otho and Vitellius the first bungling shots of the
provinces at having a hand in things at the center; wholesome
Vespasian was their first representative emperor: Nerva and
those that followed him represented equally the provinces and a
regenerated Rome.--This tells you what Nero's Rome was, and how
it came to tolerate Nero; when Vitellius came in with his band
of ruffians from the Rhine, and the streets flowed with blood day
after day, the places of low resort were as full as ever through
it all; while carnage reigned in the forums, riotous vice
reigned within doors.

But look outside of Rome, and the picture is very different. The
Spaniard, Gaul, Illyrian, Asiatic and the rest, were enjoying the
Roman Peace. There was progress; if not at the center,
everywhere between that and the periphery of civilization. Life,
even in Italy (in the country parts) was growing steadily more
cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was
assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the
Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people
was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in
which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid
pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with
perhaps not much to counter-balance them, _in Rome._ Paris has