His consulship ended, Caesar received a substantial prize for his services, the government of the province of Gaul for five years. Before he left Italy to take up his command, he had the satisfaction of seeing Cicero driven into banishment. That done, he crossed the Alps. The next nine years (for his government was prolonged for another period when the first came to an end) he was engaged in almost incessant war, though still finding time to manage the politics of Rome. The campaigns which ended in making Gaul from the Alps to the British Channel, and from the Atlantic to the Rhine, a Roman possession, it is not within my purpose to describe. Nevertheless, it may be interesting to say a few words about his dealings with our own island. In his first expedition, in the summer of 55 B.C., he did little more than effect a landing on the coast, and this not without considerable loss. In the next, made early in the following year, he employed a force of more than forty thousand men, conveyed in a flotilla of eight hundred ships. This time the Britons did not venture to oppose his landing; and when they met him in the field, as he marched inward, they were invariably defeated. They then changed their tactics and retired before him, laying waste the country as they went. He crossed the Thames some little way to the westward of where London now stands, received the submission of one native tribe, and finally concluded a peace with the native leader Cassivelaunus, who gave hostages and promised tribute. The general result of ten years' fighting was to add a great province to the empire at the cost of a horrible amount of bloodshed, of the lives, as some say, of two millions of men, women, and children (for Caesar, though not positively cruel, was absolutely careless of suffering), and to leave the conqueror master of the Roman world. The coalition indeed was broken up, for Crassus had perished in the East, carrying on a foolish and unprovoked war with the Parthians, and Pompey had come to fear and hate his remaining rival. But Caesar was now strong enough to do without friends, and to crush enemies. The Senate vainly commanded him to disperse his army by a certain day, on pain of being considered an enemy of the country. He continued to advance till he came to the boundaries of Italy, a little river, whose name, the Rubicon, was then made famous forever, which separated Cisalpine Gaul from Umbria. To cross this was practically to declare war, and even the resolute Caesar hesitated awhile. He thought his course over by himself; he even consulted his friends. He professed himself pained at the thought of the war of which his act would be the beginning, and of how posterity would judge his conduct. Then with the famous words, "The die is cast," he plunged into the stream. Pompey fled from Rome and from Italy. Caesar did not waste an hour in pursuing his success. First making Italy wholly his own, he