Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/112

88 , who advise us now, employed last year all your wealth of words and all your marvellous faculty of oratory in a studied and weighty speech in the Senate against that worthy citizen Aulus Gabinius, when he proposed his law for appointing a single commander-in-chief against the pirates; and again from this place, where I now stand, you spoke at length against that law to the People. Well, suppose that—Heaven help us!—the Roman People had then listened to your counsels rather than to its own instinct of self-preservation and to the cogency of fact, should we this day be enjoying this glorious present, and this Empire which we hold over the wide world? For how could you call that an Empire, when legates and prætors and quæstors of the Roman People were taken captive? When neither the State nor its citizens could touch the supplies which should have come to them from all the provinces? when every sea was so closed to us that we could conduct no business, private or public, across the water? . . . And so the Roman People judged that you, Hortensius, and the rest who agreed with you, spoke in all sincerity what you believed to be for the best; but it preferred, when the public safety was at stake, to obey the call of its own sufferings rather than bow to your authority. And so one law, one man, one year has not only freed us from that distress and that reproach, but has made us at last to be in very truth what we claimed to be, lords by land and by sea over all peoples and nations."

The result could not be doubtful. The law of