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54 B.C.] himself the speakers. In this latter dialogue he repeatedly refers to the outlines of the State laid down by Scipio in the former treatise as supplying the principles on which he is working, and the two must undoubtedly be taken together as portions of the same task. Only fragments of the later and more important books of The Commonwealth survive; but it is clear that after describing the unmixed forms of government, which he considers to be all unsatisfactory, monarchy being the best of them, Scipio is made to decide in favour of a mixed constitution, such as he conceives that of Rome to be. In The Laws, accordingly, we find even the most perverse details of the Roman constitution preserved. Cicero has much to say of the duties of a statesman, but he seems blind to the faults in the machinery of government. His methods of reasoning are those of the Greek philosophers, his conclusions those of a Roman statesman with all a Roman's limitations. The experience of the world has silently worked out the problem which the greatest men of antiquity could not solve. Cæsar and Cicero were the "least mortal minds" of Republican Rome, yet neither of them conceived it as possible, that not only a free city could be organised but a free nation.

We can gather little from these treatises regarding Cicero's opinion on the questions before the world at the moment when he wrote. It has been supposed indeed that in the fragments of the fifth book of The Commonwealth, the picture of the "princeps," "the guide of the State," "the director of the