The prize fell to Sulla; but no sooner was his back turned on Italy than the Marian faction fell on their political enemies and sought to destroy them by wholesale murder. Compromise was utterly forgotten; all the brutality of unbridled human nature was let loose. And when Sulla returned from the East, after driving the enemy out of Roman territory, the massacres were revenged by more massacres. The loss to Italy of many thousands of her best men, and among them scores who might have done good work in the world, was a calamity never to be repaired. Where, one may ask, was the old Roman _gravitas_ and _pietas_, the self-restraint and sense of duty that had won an empire? It would seem as if the capacity for discipline were entirely lost, except in the long-service army. But the mere fact that in the army this survived is one not to be neglected, even if it were exercised less on behalf of the State than in the interest of the individual commander. For if there could be found a statesman-soldier who could identify himself with the true interest of the State, and so bring back not only the army, but the people to a right idea of Rome’s position and duty in the world, the Empire and civilisation might yet be saved. Without the army these could not be defended; and the one thing wanting was to make the army loyal to the State as well as to its general. Only the general himself could secure this loyalty, by making himself the true servant of the State. But the man into whose hands Rome had now fallen was one who could not possibly identify himself with the best interests of the State, because an unsympathetic nature had denied him the power of discerning what those interests were. Sulla has been compared to Napoleon, and in one or two points the comparison holds good; but the two were utterly unlike in the main point, the power of sympathetic discernment. Napoleon, cruel and unscrupulous as he often was, showed plainly, when he organised the institutions of France, or Switzerland, or Egypt, that he understood the needs of those nations: he divined what would enable them to advance out of stagnation to some better form of life, social and political. But Sulla, though he saw that the call of the moment was for order at almost any price, for peace, strong government, and reform, went about his work in a way which proved that he did not delight in it, or care for the people for whom he was legislating. He did what was necessary for the moment, but did it with force ill concealed under constitutional forms. So no wise man rejoiced in his work, and the Roman people as a whole felt no loyalty towards him. He provided in many State departments an excellent machinery, but not the motive force to work it.