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 leader of the oligarchy as interpreting the desire of the people. The second fallacy consists in supposing that such a crisis as that which had arrived in the Roman society of Cæsar's day could really recur in a modern society which is not based on slavery, and which possesses representative institutions. The only part of the nineteenth-century world in which such a crisis was even possible has been secured against that remote contingency by the events which saved the integrity of the American Union. A theory of imperialism which ignores these profound differences is spanning an impassable gulf with a bridge of cobwebs. Mr Froude's view of Cæsar's work has thus much in common with the two which have been noticed, that he also regards it as a work of necessity. He thus sums up the situation at the close of the Civil War (p. 435):—

"Thus bloodily ended the civil war which the Senate of Rome had undertaken against Cæsar to escape the reforms which were threatened by his second consulship. They had involuntarily rendered their country the best service which they were capable of conferring upon it, for the attempts which Cæsar would have made to amend a system too decayed to benefit by the process had been rendered for ever impossible by their persistence. The free constitution of the Republic had issued at last in elections which were a mockery of representation, in courts of law which were an insult to justice, and in the conversion of the provinces of the empire into the feeding grounds of a gluttonous aristocracy. In the army alone the Roman character and the Roman honour survived. In the imperator, therefore, as chief of the army, the care of the provinces, the direction of public policy, the sovereign authority in the last appeal, could alone thenceforward reside. The Senate might remain as a Council of State; the magistrates