imitation, but to independent reproduction.
In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism,
with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker,
with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth
a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written
by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue
of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic
machine, every constitution however defective which gives play
to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely
surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former
is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is
and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself
in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself
all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius
and in the absence of all material complications from without,
that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely
than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show
and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external
coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally
it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early
stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul(5)
the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development
and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-
gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form
how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.
Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was
or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because--
with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery
and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation,
and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course
of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism--
absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary
and the least of evils. When once the slave-holding aristocracy
in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as
their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too
be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history;(6)
where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once
a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit
to curtail t