The empire itself was on the point of dissolution. In empires founded by single conquerors, such as those of the East, when corruption has made the reigning family its prey, the satraps make themselves independent. The empire of Alexander was divided among his generals. The empire of the conquering republic of Rome, the republic itself having succumbed to vices analagous to the corruption of a reigning family, was about to be broken up by the great military chiefs. Pompey had already, in fact, carved out for himself a separate kingdom in Spain, which with its legions he had got permanently into his own hands. Thus the unity of the civilized portion of humanity, so indispensable to the future of the race, would have been lost. Nor was there any remedy but one. Representation of the provinces was out of the question. Supposing it possible that a single assembly could have been formed out of all these different races and tongues, the representation of the conquered would have been the abdication of the conqueror, and abdication was a step for which the lazzaroni of the so-called democratic party were as little prepared as the haughtiest aristocrat in Rome. A world of egotism, without faith or morality, could be held together only by force, which presented itself in the person of the ablest, most daring, and most unscrupulous adventurer of the time. If faith should again fail, and the world again be reduced to a mass of egotism, the same sort of government will again, be needed. In fact, we are at this moment rather in danger of something of the kind, and these revivals of Caesarism are not wholly out of season. But in any other case to propose to society such a model would be treason to humanity. The abandonment of military duty by the Roman people had, among other things, made slavery more immoral than ever, because there was no longer any semblance of a division of labour: the master could no longer be said to defend the slave in war while the slave supported him by labour at home. Becoming more immoral, slavery became more cruel. The six thousand crosses erected on the road from Capua to Rome after the Servile War were the terrible proof. As to the existence of an oligarchy in the bosom of the dominant republic, this would in itself have been no great evil to the subject world, to which it mattered little whether its tyrants were a hundred or a hundred thousand; just as to the unenfranchised in modern communities it matters little whether the enfranchised class be large or small. In fact, the broader the basis of a tyranny, the more fearless and unscrupulous, generally speaking, the tyranny is.