the moral fitness or actual _right_ of his murder, but to the common law or ancient usage of Rome, by which any person of great influence, who was considered powerful enough to be dangerous to the ascendency of the patrician rank, or to the established order of things in any way, might be killed by any self-constituted executioner, even though the person thus murdered on bare suspicion of a liability to become dangerous, should really be innocent of the charge of aspiring to supreme power. (“Melium _jure_ caesum pronuntiavit, _etiam si regni crimine insons fuerit_.” Livy book iv. chapter 48.) The idea, that such an abominable outrage on the claim of an innocent man to his own life, could ever be seriously defended as morally _right_, is too palpably preposterous to bear a consideration. Such a principle of policy must have originated in a republicanism, somewhat similar to that which sanctions those exertions of democratic power, which have lately become famous under the name of Lynch law. It was a principle which in Rome enabled the patrician order to secure the destruction of any popular man of genius and intelligence, who, being able, might become willing to effect a revolution which would humble the power of the patrician aristocracy. The murder of the Gracchi, also, may be taken as a fair manifestation of the way in which the aristocracy were disposed to check the spirit of reform. The work of Caesar, then, was twofold, like the tyranny which he was to subvert; and well did he achieve both objects of his mighty efforts. Having first brought down the pride and the power of an overbearing aristocracy, he next, by the force of the same dominant genius, wrested the ill-wielded dominion from the unsteady hands of the fickle democracy, making them willingly subservient to the great purpose of their own subjugation, and acquiescent in the generous sway of one, whom a sort of political instinct taught them to fix on, as the man destined to rule them.