Page:Charactersevents00ferriala.djvu/96

 but for another reason. Saint Jerome tells us that in 25 B.C., Augustus increased the tribute from the Gauls: we find no difficulty in getting at the reason of this fact. The thing most urgent after the re-establishment of peace was the re-arrangement of finance; that signified then, as always, an increase of imposts: but more could not be extorted from the Oriental provinces, already exhausted by so many wars and plunderings; therefore the idea to draw greater revenues from the European provinces of recent conquest, particularly from Gaul, which until then had paid so little. So you see a-forging one link after another in the chain: Cæsar for a political interest conquers Gaul; thirty years afterward Augustus goes there to seek new revenues for his balance-sheet; thence-forward there are always immediate needs that urge Roman politics into Gallic affairs: and so it is that little by little Roman politics become permanently involved, by a kind of concatenation, not by deliberate plan.

We can easily follow the process. Augustus had left in Gaul to exact the new tribute, a former slave of Cæsar's, afterward liberated,--a Gaul or German whom Cæsar had captured as a child in one of his expeditions and later freed, because of his consummate administrative abili