had equally thrown the public power into a settlement fatal to the
public welfare. Not any decay of public virtue, but increase of
poverty amongst the inferior citizens, had thrown the suffrages,
and consequently the honors and powers of the state, into the hands
of some forty or fifty houses, rich enough to bribe, and bribing
systematically. Caesar, undertaking to correct a state of disease
which would else have convulsed the republic every third year
by civil war, knew that no arguments could be available against a
competition of mere interests. The remedy lay, not through opposition
speeches in the senate, or from the rostra,--not through pamphlets
or journals,--but through a course of intense cudgelling.
This he happily accomplished; and by that means restored Rome for
centuries,--not to the aspiring condition which she once held,
but to an immunity from annual carnage, and in other respects to
a condition of prosperity which, if less than during her popular
state, was greater than any else attainable after that popular state
had become impossible, from changes in the composition of society.

Here, and in all other critical periods of ancient republics,
we shall find that opinions did not exist as the grounds of feud,
nor could by any dexterity have been applied to the settlement of
feuds. Whereas, on the other hand, with ourselves for centuries,
and latterly with the French, no public contest has arisen, or does
now exist, without fighting its way through every stage of advance
by appeals to public opinion. If, for instance, an improved tone of
public feeling calls for a gradual mitigation of army punishments,
the quarrel becomes instantly an intellectual one: and much information
is brought forward, which throws light upon human nature generally.
But in Rome, such a discussion would have been stopped summarily,
as interfering with the discretional power of the Praetorium. To