into the Senate; and the Roman senator, though in Rome itself and in free
debate among his colleagues he was handled as an ordinary man, when he
travelled had the honors of a sovereign. The three hundred senators of
Rome were three hundred princes. They moved about in other countries with
the rights of legates, at the expense of the province, with their trains
of slaves and horses. The proud privilege of Roman citizenship was still
jealously reserved to Rome itself and to a few favored towns and colonies;
and a mere subject could maintain no rights against a member of the
haughty oligarchy which controlled the civilized world. Such generally the
Roman Republic had become, or was tending to become, in the years which
followed the fall of Carthage, B.C. 146. Public spirit in the masses was
dead or sleeping; the Commonwealth was a plutocracy. The free forms of the
constitution were themselves the instruments of corruption. The rich were
happy in the possession of all that they could desire. The multitude was
kept quiet by the morsels of meat which were flung to it when it
threatened to be troublesome. The seven thousand in Israel, the few who in
all states and in all times remained pure in the midst of evil, looked on
with disgust, fearing that any remedy which they might try might be worse
than the disease. All orders in a society may be wise and virtuous, but
all cannot be rich. Wealth which is used only for idle luxury is always
envied, and envy soon curdles into hate. It is easy to persuade the masses
that the good things of this world are unjustly divided, especially when
it happens to be the exact truth. It is not easy to set limits to an
agitation once set on foot, however justly it may have been provoked, when
the cry for change is at once stimulated by interest and can disguise its
real character under the passionate language of patriotism. But it was not
to be expected that men of noble natures, young men especially whose
enthusiasm had not been cooled by experience, would sit calmly by while
their country was going thus headlong to perdition. Redemption, if
redemption was to be hoped for, could come only from free citizens in the