Classes was a matter no longer of birth, but of money alone. And all
history testifies that the State which becomes a plutocracy is doomed
indeed. Of all possible forms of government--autocracy, oligarchy,
democracy--that is the lowest, that most surely bears within itself
the seeds of its own inevitable ruin.

A. 5.--So it was with the Roman Republic. As soon as this stage was
reached it began to "stew in its own juice" with appalling rapidity.
Reformers, like the Gracchi, were crushed; and the commonwealth went
to pieces under the shocks and counter-shocks of demagogues like
Clodius, conspirators like Catiline, and military adventurers such
as Marius and Sulla--for whose statue the Senate could find no more
constitutional title than "The Lucky General" [_Sullae Imperatori
Felici_] Well-meaning individuals, such as Cicero and Pompey, were
still to be found, and even came to the front, but they all alike
proved unequal to the crisis; which, in fact, threw up one man, and
one only, of force to become a real maker of history--Caius Julius
Caesar, the first Roman invader of Britain.

A. 6.--Caesar was at the time of this invasion (55 B.C.) some
forty-five years old; but he had not long become a real power in the
political arena. Sprung from the bluest blood of Rome--the Julian
House tracing their origin to the mythical Iulus, son of Aeneas, and
thus claiming descent from the Goddess Venus--we might have expected
to find him enrolled amongst the aristocratic conservatives, the
champions of the _régime_ of Sulla. But though a mere boy at the date
of the strife between the partisans of Sulla and Marius (B.C. 88-78),
Caesar was already clear-sighted enough to perceive that in the
"Classes" of that day there was no help for the tempest-tossed
commonwealth. Accordingly he threw in his lot with the revolutionary