We need not overstate the case. If we do we shall tarnish the laurels of Caesar, who would have shown no genius in killing the republic had the republic been already dead. There was still respect for the law and the constitution. Pompey's hesitation when supreme power was within his grasp, Caesar's own pause at the Rubicon, are proofs of it. The civil wars of Marius and Sulla had fearfully impaired, in the eyes of Romans, but they had not utterly destroyed, the majesty of Rome. There were still great characters--characters which you may dislike, but of which you can never rationally speak with contempt--and there must have been some general element of worth in which these characters were formed. If the recent administration of the Senate had not been glorious, still, from a Roman point of view, it had not been disastrous: the revolt of the slaves and the insurrection in Spain had been quelled; Mithridates had been conquered; the pirates, though for a time their domination accused the feebleness of the government, had at length been put down. The only great military calamity of recent date was the defeat of Crassus, whose unprovoked and insane invasion of Parthia was the error, not of the Senate, but of the Triumvirate. Legions were forthcoming for the conquest of Gaul, and a large reserve of treasure was found in the sacred treasure-house when it was broken open by Caesar. Bad governors of provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished. Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well. So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice were not quite out of fashion. The old Roman spirit still struggled against luxury, and we find Cicero suffering from indigestion, caused by a supper of vegetables at the house of a wealthy friend, whose excellent cook had developed all the resources of gastronomic art in struggling with the restrictions imposed by a sumptuary law. There was intellectual life, and all the civilized tastes and half-moral qualities which the existence of intellectual life implies. In spite of the sanguinary anarchy which often broke out in the Roman streets, Cicero, the most cultivated and the least combative of men, when in exile or in his province, sighs for the capital as a Frenchman sighs for Paris. In short, if we consider the case fairly, we shall admit, I believe, that, besides the force of memory and of old allegiance, there was enough of worth and of apparent hope left, not only to excuse republican illusions, but probably to make it a duty to try the issue with fate. I say probably, and, after all, how can we presume to speak with certainty of a situation so distant from us in time, and so imperfectly recorded?