Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/71

 There remained no mode of establishing a fixed government in Rome, but by vesting all power in the hands of one man. In Italy, no opposition whatever was made to Cæsar, on the part of the people or of the slaves. The only opposition proceeded from the aristocracy, and they could offer resistance only in the remoter subjected districts, with the aid of hireling troops, sustained by the revenues of the provinces, which were still under the control of the senate. The people conferred on Cæsar all the power which he could desire; he was created dictator for a year, that he might subdue his enemies, and consul for five years, that lie might confirm his authority. The inviolability of his person was secured by his election as tribune for life.

What would have been the policy of Julius Cæsar, had he remained in power, cannot be safely conjectured. To say that he had no plan is absurd; every step in his progress was marked by consistency. The establishment of monarchy was already an alternative to slavery. Cæsar did more. lie issued an ordinance, not indeed of immediate abolition, but commanding that one-third part of the labor of Italy should be performed by free hands. The command was rendered inoperative by the assassination of Cæsar, the greatest misfortune that could have happened to Rome. For who were his murderers? Not the people, not the insurgent bondmen; but a portion of the aristocracy, to whom the greatest happiness of the greatest number was a matter of supreme indifference.

The great majority of the conspirators have never found a eulogist. Every ancient writer speaks of them with reprobation and contempt. Cassius, one of the chief leaders, was notoriously selfish, violent, and disgracefully covetous, not to say dishonest. He is universally represented as envying injustice rather than abhorring it, and his conduct has ever been ascribed to personal malevolence, and not to patriotism. But Brutus! History never manufactured him into a hero, till he had made himself an assassin. Of a headstrong, unbridled disposition, he never displayed coolness of judgment in any part of his career. It was his misfortune to have been the son of an abandoned woman, and to have been bred in a home which adultery and wantonness had defiled. The vices of early indulgence may be palliated by his youth and the licentiousness of his time; but Brutus, while yet young, was notorious as a merciless and exorbitant usurer at the rate of four per cent, a month, or forty-eight per cent, a year. When his debtors grew unable to pay, he obtained for his agent an appointment to a military post, and extorted his claims by martial law. The town of Salamis, in the isle of Cyprus, owed him money on the terms we have mentioned. He caused the members of its bankrupt municipal government to be confined in their town-hall, in the hope that hunger would quicken their financial skill; and some of them were starved to death. Such was Brutus at that ingenuous period of life, when benevolence is usually most active. Brutus hated Pompey, yet after deliberating, he joined the party of that leader, and remained true to it, so long as it seemed to be the strongest; but no sooner was the battle of Pharsalia won, than Brutus gave in his adhesion to Cæsar, and to confer a value on his conversion, he betrayed the confidence of the fugitive, whose cause he had abandoned! In the plot against Cæsar, Brutus was the dupe of more sagacious men. The admirer transfers his own enthusiasm for liberty to those who claimed to be the champions of the republic; and reverences the crime of inconsiderate passion, as the exercise of righteous vengeance.

Cæsar had received the senate sitting; this insult required immediate vengeance. They murdered Cæsar, not from public spirit, but from mortified vanity and angry discontent. The people, who had been pleased with the humiliation of their oppressors, were indignant at the assassination, and the assassins themselves had no ulterior plan. Slavery had poisoned the Roman State to the marrow; and though the conspirators had no fixed line of policy, yet the condition of the population of Italy led immediately to monarchy. The young Octavian owed his elevation, not to his talents, but to the