Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/117



austere in his habits? Ah! he is then a new Brutus with his Jacobin severity, censuring the amiable and well-groomed court, and he is a suspect. If he be a philosopher, an orator, or a poet, it will serve him ill to be of greater renown than those who govern, for can it be permitted to pay more attention to the author living on a fourth floor than to the emperor in his gilded palace? Such a one is a suspect.

Has one made a reputation as a warrior—he is but the more dangerous by reason of his talent. There are many resources with an inefficient general. If he is a traitor he can not so quickly deliver his army to the enemy. But an officer of merit like an Agricola—if he be disloyal, not one can be saved. Therefore, all such had better be removed and promptly placed at a distance from the army.

Tacitus tells us that there was anciently in Rome a law specifying the crimes of "lèse-majesté." That crime carried with it the punishment of death. Under the Roman republic treasons were reduced to four kinds, viz.: abandoning an army in the country of an enemy; exciting sedition; the maladministration of the public treasury; and the impairment by inefficiency of the majesty of the Roman people.

But the Roman emperors needed more clauses, in order that they might place cities and citizens under proscription. Augustus was the first to extend the list of offenses that were "lèse-majesté" or revolutionary, and under his