Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/198

168 hopes and ideals with which Greece and Rome had enriched the world. To these hopes and ideals Cicero clung, and unhappily he clung at the same time to the use of the very imperfect machinery which Greece had invented for the fashioning of political liberty and order.

A State great and powerful, as Rome had now become, had really outgrown the forms adapted to the government of a city. These forms supplied no means by which the collective will of the great body of Roman citizens could find a regular and peaceful expression; they afforded no effective machinery for making the provincial administration work in due harmony and subordination to the central government, or for bringing home to the central government itself any sense of responsibility whether towards citizens or subjects. The Senate was too weak when it had to deal with the details of government throughout the empire, or to defend the civilised world by military force and at the same time to keep the soldiers and their commanders in order; it was too strong, whenever for the sake of its own interests it chose to ignore or to defy public opinion at home. The rectification of abuses, which with better arrangements might have been accomplished by a change of ministry, was possible under this perverse system only at the cost of revolution.

Cicero seems to have been unconscious of these defects. He never saw that, if the free State was to survive, it must invent a fresh machinery of government. He looked on the forces which destroyed the