The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second century was another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes. In the second century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, which have a certain resemblance to modern ones. There increased solicitude for the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmented the number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicity by administrative means. The movement was supported by intellectual men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial aptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of these bureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weaker with the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empire was bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman in statesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitan bureaucracy of men of brains: orators, _litterati_, lawyers. Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that the imperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, the formation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences of that natural unification, the chief reason for which should be sought in the great economic movement. The economic unification was first and was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperial bureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of material interests. After the material unity, after the political, there should have been formed the moral and intellectual; but at this point, the forces of Rome gave way. Rome had gathered under its sceptre too many races, too many kinds of culture, religions too diverse; its spirit was too exclusively political, administrative, and judicial; it could not therefore conciliate the ideas, assimilate the customs, weld the sentiments, unify the religions, by its laws and decrees. To this end was necessary the power of ideas, of doctrines, of beliefs that officials of administration could neither create nor propagate. The work was to be accomplished outside of, and in part against, the government. It is the work of Christianity.