An important point in this system is that there was no continuous official chain passing down from the emperor to the lowest official; the emperor could interfere at any point (a particular in which the Pope resembles the Roman emperors) and every official was regarded as directly responsible to him, though he was controlled by his superior official as well. Functionaries were made to change places rapidly, so as to prevent a man from obtaining undue influence by long residence in one place. Thus, though the growth of civil power was favourable to the development of schools, the coercive spirit which is destructive of true education remained. On the one hand, education was encouraged by the various departments of the extensive[732] Civil Service—the secretariat (_scrinium ab epistulis_), the Record Office (_a memoria_), the office for legal documents (_a libellis_), and that for the emperor’s engagements and arrangements (_scrinium dispositionum_); and on the other hand, the controller of the civil service (_magister officiorum_) sent forth his secret service men (_schola agentium in rebus_), who, beginning their career by superintending the post service (_curiosi_), became a pregnant source of corruption and oppression. Extraordinarily efficient as the imperial civil service was, it had this important loophole of corruption, while oppression was possible everywhere. The centre of the bureaucracy was the ‘Consistorium’ or Privy Council.[733] Certain high officials became ‘comites consistoriani’, and special people were called in for particular points. The position of the senate in this scheme of things is interesting from Ausonius’s statement that Minervius added to it two thousand members.[734] The number of members tended to grow enormously owing to the increasing use made by the emperor of his ‘ius adlectionis et loco movendi’, and the ‘ordo senatorius’ was still in existence. Ultimately, all who were ‘clarissimi’ belonged to the senate. But in practice only the higher officials, the priests, and the ‘consulares’ actually took part in the proceedings, which tended to become municipal rather than imperial. The position of the senate, therefore, regarded as an imperial body, was merely nominal, though it was of considerable local importance. Its chief function was to provide ‘panem et circenses’, paid for by the holders of the consulship, the praetorship, and the quaestorship, which alone survived from the old ‘cursus honorum’. At the head of the senate was the ‘praefectus urbi’, whose powers were wide and undefined. Rome’s loss of dignity, with the emperors frequently residing in Gaul and elsewhere, affected the prestige of the senate, which still met in the ‘eternal city’. Yet as the emperors became weaker we find the senate growing in importance, and during the last twenty-five years of the Western Empire its activity is remarkable.[735]