countries: those who cannot, like the great, conquer an empire,
confine themselves to blackmailing the countries and petty states that
tremble before the shadow of Rome; the courts of the secondary kings
of the Orient, the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria,--all are
invaded by a horde of insatiable senators and knights, who, menacing
and promising, extort money to spend in Italy and foment the growing
extravagance. The debts pile up, the political corruption overflows,
scandals follow, the parties in Rome rend each other madly, though
hail-fellow-well-met in the provinces to plunder subjects and vassals.
In the midst of this vast disorder Cæsar, the man of destiny, rises,
and with varying fortune makes a way for himself until he beckons
Italy to follow him, to find success and treasures in regions new--not
in the rich and fabulous East, but beyond the Alps, in barbarous Gaul,
bristling with fighters and forests.

But this insane effort to prey on every part of the Empire finally
tires Italy; quarrels over the division of spoils embitter friends;
the immensity of the conquests, made in a few years of reckless
enthusiasm, is alarming. Finally a new civil war breaks out, terrible
and interminable, in which classes and families fall upon each other
anew, to tear away in turn the spoils taken together abroad. Out of
the tremendous discord rises at last the pacifier, Augustus, who is
able gradually, by cleverness and infinite patience, to re-establish
peace and order in the troubled empire. How?--why? Because the
combination of events of the times allows him to use to ends of peace
the same forces with which the preceding generations had fomented so
much disorder--desires for ease, pleasure, culture, wealth growing
with the generations making it. Thereupon begins in the whole Empire
universal progress in agriculture, industry, trade, which, on a small
scale, may be compared to what we to-day witness and share; a progress