ng
the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution,
an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult as it was,
was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work. If the Italian nation
was really to be regenerated, it required a reorganization
which should transform all parts of the great empire--Rome, Italy,
and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate
the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new
and more tolerable time.

The Capital

The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared
from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case,
that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp
more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes
speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find
their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city;
there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating
population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass
of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt,
and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this preeminently
applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house
merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted
into imperial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly
of burgesses of the empire; and when smaller self-governing tribal
or other associations were not tolerated within the capital:
all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass
of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation,
for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime,
or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.

The Populace There

These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature
of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave
were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city
so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation
on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other,
rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics
of antiquity in general--the slave-system--were more conspicuous
in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses
of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families
or of wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the n