o the aristocracy
and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged
the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens
of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization
of the differences of rights among the classes belonging
to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate:
his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy,
that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion
and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy
was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as
Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded--
the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts
supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay
at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new;
but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere
the main matter; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution,
which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself
if he could have seen it, and which has impressed, and will
always impress, every one to whom it has been presented in the living
reality or in the mirror of history--to whatever historical epoch
or whatever shade of politics he may belong--according
to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical
greatness, with deep and ever-deepening emotion and admiration.

At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim
what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest
against the custom--common to simplicity and perfidy--of using
historical praise and historical censure, dissociated
from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application,
and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar
into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism. It is true
that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress
of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply
by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present
in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms
for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription;
it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms
of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally--
the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their
combination everywhere different--and leads and encourages men,
not to unreflecting