misgoverned by the deputies both of Julius and Augustus. In Britain, the history of the revolt of the Iceni shews that neither the extortions of Roman usurers, nor the brutalities of Roman officers, had ended with the republic. The blood tax of the conscription appears also to have been cruelly exacted. The tribute of largesses and shows which the empire, though supposed to be lifted high above all partialities, paid to the Roman populace, was drawn almost entirely from the provinces. Emperors who coined money with the tongue of the informer and the sword of the executioner, were not likely to abstain from selling governorships; and, in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does, the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the hands of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under this system the garden of Italy became a desert. The decisive fact, however, is that the provinces decayed, and that when the barbarians arrived, all power of resistance was gone. That the empire was consciously levelling and cosmopolitan, surely cannot be maintained. Actium was a Roman victory over the gods of the nations. Augustus, who must have known something about the system, avowedly aimed at restoring the number, the purity, the privileged exclusiveness of the dominant race. His legislation was an attempt to regenerate old Rome; and the political odes of the court poet are full of that purpose. That the empire degraded all that had once been noble in Rome is true; but the degradation of what had once been noble in Rome was not the regeneration of humanity. The vast slave population was no more elevated by the ascendency of the freedmen of the imperial household than the female sex was elevated by the ascendancy of Messalina.