[30 B.C.-14 A.D.] bricks but had left it a city of marble. In the literary efforts of their times both rulers took at least the share of dilettanti. Each of them, in order to neglect no part of his inheritance, not only collected the literary relics of his uncle but also defended in writing his actions as emperor. Without mentioning the smaller literary essays of either, we may note that Augustus sought to defend himself in his memoirs, while Napoleon III in his history of Julius Cæsar sought far less to write the history of Cæsar than to defend the principle of Cæsarism.

The worship of the uncle to whose popularity they owed the crown in the one case the worship of the dictator, in the other that of Napoleon I -impresses its character on the reign of both rulers. In particular, the

military glory of these two great generals was exploited by their nephews in a variety of ways. Neither Augustus nor Napoleon III were really soldiers; but they needed for their rule a powerful effective army, which they would have found far greater difficulty in bending to their ends had they not had the memories of a great past to help them. Both succeeded in creating a fighting army, the pride of the nation, which they knew how to use when it was really necessary, but without taking any real pleasure in fighting and hazard, such as was felt by Julius Cæsar and Napoleon I. The successes they loved best were not those won in war but those due to threats of war and to diplomacy. The war against the Parthians, the hereditary foes of Rome, was certainly a portion of the legacy left by the dictator; but Augustus hesitated long before beginning this really dangerous war, until good fortune played the lost standards into his hands. Military honour was hereby satisfied and the noisy rejoicing of his fellow-soldiers now relieved him of the duty of making war upon the redoubtable enemy. In the same way Napoleon III loved to increase his reputation in Europe and in his army by conducting wars which, even if they ended badly, could not shake his throne nor France itself. A war over the boundaries of the Rhine was as popular in France as a Parthian war under Augustus, but also as dangerous. For this reason Napoleon III made several attempts to attain the fruits of such a war by peaceable means and only proceeded to a declaration of war when he had convinced himself that there was no prospect of success in such attempts.

A ROMAN TRIPOD

In a word, then as now the statesman succeeded the general, the prince of peace the warrior prince, nor did the former despise military glory; only he preferred to decorate himself with the laurels plucked from his uncle's wreath. Augustus, no less than Napoleon III, reckoned it as of the very essence of the services he did to the world that he had put an end to the period of warfare at home and abroad. Just as Napoleon III, in the character of saviour of society, pronounced the dictum, "L'Empire c'est la paix," so Augustus caused himself to be celebrated as the restorer of order and liberty, whose privilege it was thrice to shut the doors of Janus and to inaugurate a new era of things.

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Neither was a man of genius, both were practical and astute to no common degree; they were cool political calculators who had early learned to conduct their own policies and to judge all circumstances from the practical point of view. If they sought an end they did not shrink from the means to accomplish it; as a parallel to the misdeeds of the triumvirs we have every right to quote the measures under Napoleon III by which the president was raised to an emperor. Later in their career both avoided acts of violence as far as possible, and in the face of outspoken public opinion, the symptoms of which they studied zealously, both made concessions even in the teeth of their own better convictions, for they were astute enough to know that their supremacy could not depend on might alone.

Possessed as they were of power they sought also to conciliate and fortify the conservative elements of the state. Those who bore old and famous names were treated with just such a preference in the bestowal of external honours by Augustus as in later times by Napoleon, whose endeavour was to adorn his new imperial nobility with the fairest names of old feudal France. As he succeeded in reconciling the old nobility to some extent with the new order of things, so Napoleon understood how to conclude peace with the church, a peace which he bought and preserved at considerable cost. In a similar way Augustus, who took upon himself the dignity of a high priest, attempted to reanimate national traditions and the religion of the past and to reorganise the priesthoods.

The similarity of the two rulers is obvious and has been frequently referred to. That it should until now have been less recognised than it ought, is, perhaps, due to the fact that the characters of the two were after all fundamentally different. One might almost say the similarity lay in the circumstances of the times, the dissimilarity in the characters of the persons; and the more we harp on the former the clearer appears the latter. Napoleon remained all his life what Augustus never was, a dreamer and a conspirator. According to the version of De Tocqueville, Napoleon knew no hard and fast boundary between dreaming and thinking; this may have been the result of his moping youth with its conspiracies, his imprisonment, and his fantastic designs which never were realised but by the most extraordinary strokes of luck. Augustus, on the other hand, never had time to devote to dreamy imaginings. When he was still almost a boy, he had thrown himself on his own initiative into the struggle of parties, and from the beginning he had to summon all the powers of his mind to aid him in the struggle against opponents maturer than himself; so it is that later when power was his he never dreamed but always thought. Moreover, Augustus was never a conspirator. He obtained power early and wielded it recklessly. He both loathed and found superfluous that covert toying with designs and intrigues which shunned the public eye until they suddenly burst into publicity with éclat, such as Napoleon loved.

Augustus enjoyed the great advantage of still being teachable when he came into the actual possession of power, and of being formed into a statesman by the circumstances themselves; Napoleon, on the other hand, was much older when he came to the throne; in his best years he was forging schemes to attain an apparently unattainable goal. He was laughed at as a nurser of fancies until he became emperor; small wonder then that the emperor's plans remained fanciful and singular and that, as a ruler, he lacked the gift which distinguished Augustus in so high a degree—the gift of judging soberly what was attainable, or what was necessary. As emperor, Napoleon could never quite forget the adventurous designs of his youth. Place

[30 B.C.-14 A.D.] at the disposal of such a man the whole machinery of power in modern France, and perhaps he will be able to carry out plans that a careful observer would pronounce to be impossible of execution, but the reaction is bound to come, and it did not fail to do so here.

It is true that there were greater difficulties in reorganising France than Augustus encountered, so that the position of Augustus was more favourable and more secure. In spite of his confident address Napoleon felt his weakness, and upon him lay the burden of justifying himself by success that was externally visible; his object was to surprise and to dazzle his people, or at the very least to keep them occupied, and he was thus misled into taking many a false and many a critical step which a true statesman, like Augustus, would have at once condemned.

But all his internal mistakes and difficulties were not enough to upset the second empire. The catastrophe was brought about by Napoleon having an enemy from outside, an enemy far more formidable than those outside enemies who might have declared war upon Augustus. Napoleon fully realised the danger that threatened him from this quarter; yet he was helplessly engulfed in the whirlpool that was destined to swallow him and his work with him.

From the point of view of the world's history, then, Augustus appears as a far greater figure than Napoleon III. Antiquity spoke, we speak yet today, of the Age of Augustus with reason, and this is an honour that weighs more than the name of Great; a man gives his name to his time only when he has really stamped that time with his image, opening up new roads, not only to his own nation but to the history of his time. Such an honour then implies permanent achievement in the widest sense; no impartial historien, then, will ever speak of the Age of Napoleon III.

The French Empire was shattered while its founder was yet alive, and when it fell, its inner hollowness, its rotten foundations, lay exposed, so that the whole appeared no more than an adventurous episode in the history of France. The work of Augustus, on the other hand, was indispensable to the world's history; it outlived its founder, and lasted with some modification to the end of antiquity. Succeeding generations saw in Augustus the ideal prince, and hailed each newly chosen emperor with the invocation: "Be thou happier than Augustus, better than Trajan.”

THE ROMAN EMPIRE COMPARED WITH MODERN ENGLAND

Of all the empires of later times Great Britain is the only one that can really be compared with the Roman Empire, for its constitution has been developed in quite a different way from that of continental states, and has preserved a much greater diversity by reason of that conservative spirit which the English share with the Romans. True, in our own century much has changed; for the old aristocratic England has become democratised; many a resemblance of England to the Roman Empire, which even to-day may be detected, appears in a much clearer light if we cast our glance back to the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is the case, for instance, with the position of parliament. As the ancient state recognised in theory a diarchia of the emperor and the senate, so, too, the English parliament at the close of the seventeenth century ranged itself, at least for all practical purposes, on the side of the sovereign power; and it was only a jealous watchfulness lest the power of the chief ruler might become too great, that saved the English parliament from the fate of the

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Roman senate. The critical battle between the two constitutional powers was fought at the end of the seventeenth century, when William of Orange, like Augustus in ancient Rome before him, made an attempt to dovetail a standing army into the frame of the constitution. But the English parliament resisted every attempt in this direction with stubborn obstinacy. Moreover the powerful nobility at home, and the energetic merchants and officials spread all over the world, correspond in the England of to-day to the aristocrats, the merchants and the officials of ancient Rome, just as great wealth on the one side is conditional with great poverty on the other.

The latifundia of ancient Italy may in dimensions have been about equal to the gross landed estates of the English aristocracy, but with slaves to work them in antiquity they had a far more desolating effect, even though we must admit that owing to the villas and parks laid out for the great in England, a portion of the free peasantry are thrust out of their plot of ground and England has had to turn for the means of life, etc., to the foreigner.

Also the difference of political rights between the full citizen with full rights and the slave without any rights at all was as marked in England a hundred years ago as it was in Rome. The relations between the Roman and the Latin citizens might then have justly borne comparison with the conflicting elements furnished by Englishmen and Scotchmen, which to-day are ever growing less and less; but even to-day the Irish on the one hand, with their reluctance to obey, and the English colonies on the other, with their successful diffusion of the English language and English national feeling abroad, reflect most faithfully the picture of ancient Rome.

But above all, England belongs to the few modern states which still possess provinces in the antique sense of the word. The constitution of modern India, with its multiform variety, is the only one of our time that may be set side by side with the constitution of the subject territories of the Romans. In India, as in the latter, the contrasts-religious, ethnographical, and social-are great and very often immediate; by the side of an old and highly developed civilisation we find the simplest conditions of mountain or fisher folk, over whose heads a history of a thousand years has passed without leaving a trace. Again, the political situation of single portions of the country is as multiform as possible: Ceylon, for example, with its separate administration and its separate rights, forms a part of England, while the main continent is only directly or indirectly governed by English officials; its constitution, as in the ancient Roman Empire, defies juristic or political definition in a variety of ways. Only one portion of the country is directly subject to its foreign conquerors; in all the others has been preserved often to the good luck of the nation-a remnant of the earlier national independence.

As in ancient Rome, England to-day allows the existence of native princes, great and small, who lighten for her the burden of rule and administration; and she permits them to tyrannise over their subjects and extort treasure from them if they fail in their duty to the empire, just as did the sultans

[30 B.C.-14 A.D.] of previous centuries. The real power is, for all this, in the hands of the English resident who is set to watch over them. If the evils of local misrule become too great, or the times are ripe for annexation, a stroke of the pen is enough to do away with the whole majesty of a local prince. England is not wont to meet with serious resistance in such a case, any more than did the Romans when they declared that any particular one of their tributary princes had ceased to reign.

Again, the position of the ruling nation in the very midst of the ruled is, in modern times, just what it was in the days of antiquity. The man who goes to India, whether as a merchant, an official, or a soldier, does so with the fixed intention of returning home as soon as his financial position allows of his doing so. Considering the immense disparity in numbers between rulers and ruled, the power of the single officials and people in command must naturally be very considerable. The viceroy of India may well be compared with a Roman proconsul; the range of his power is great, but by a time limit it is sought to forestall an abuse of it. Even after the reforms of Augustus, the means of control were inadequate in ancient times, just as they were in England a century ago. To-day it may be taken as the rule for the higher class of English officials to return home from India with clean hands.

Whether this parallel between the Roman Empire of antiquity and the England of to-day is to the credit of the latter or a subject for reproach, whether it will endure, or whether the modern conditions will develop on similar lines, are questions into which we have not here to inquire; it is enough to have indicated the parallel phenomena in the two great empires. ¿

THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION

The sanguinary civil wars with their appalling catastrophes had crippled the might of Rome; the staunchest and most faithful champions of republican principles lay mouldering on the coast of Thapsus or the plain of Philippi; the free state that had erstwhile been called into being by the elder Brutus had passed away the reality on the day of Pharsalia, the ideal through the desperate deed of the younger Brutus.

The struggle between democracy and monarchy had come to an end, political passions were silenced, the existing generation yearned for peace and quiet; the aristocrats that they might take their fill of the pleasures and enjoyments placed at their command by ample means, by culture, art, and learning, the multitude that they might pass the fleeting hours in comfortable leisure, remote from political agitations and warlike toils, their desires limited to the "bread and games" (panem et circenses) which the ruling powers were sedulous to provide for them in liberal measure.

Under these circumstances it was not difficult for the adroit Octavian — who combined great ability and capacity for rule with gentleness, moderation, and perseverance, and was able to disguise his fiery ambition and pride of place under the homely manners of a plain citizen and a show of submission to law and traditional custom-to enter fully upon the heritage of the great Cæsar and convert the republic into a monarchy. But Octavian, warned by the tragic end of his adoptive father, went very cautiously and circumspectly to work. Instead of assuming all at once the fulli.ess of royal power and dignity with which Cæsar had been invested at the time of his death, his son followed his example in the gradual absorption of a divided