privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and