Also he openly spurned the proud senators and permitted the servile modes of address which Augustus and other emperors had forbidden. These high-handed proceedings made the senators hate and plot against him. Plots were followed by executions, and Domitian gradually became more and more tyrannical. More of the Stoic Republican party were executed, and the odious practice of delation came once more into vogue. At last there was a successful plot organised in the palace, and Domitian fell to the dagger. With the three succeeding emperors, Nerva (96-98), Trajan (98-117), and Hadrian (117-138), we have a series of genuine constitutional rulers who show the system of the principate at its best. The excellent figure which these rulers cut on the page of history is not wholly unconnected with the fact that we have now passed beyond the region illuminated by the satire of Tacitus and the tittle-tattle of Suetonius. Their deeds speak for them. In Nerva we have the senate’s choice of a ruler, elderly, blameless, but decidedly weak. Had he not died in less than two years, he could easily have brought the throne of the Cæsars down to the ground. Knowing his own weakness, Nerva had adopted the foremost soldier of his day as his heir, and Trajan, beloved of the soldiers and ready to purchase the love of the Rome rabble, succeeded without a murmur. He spent most of his reign in the camp. In the camp he died, and the succession was by no means clear when Hadrian, a kinsman though a distant one, had the courage to seize and the luck to hold the imperial power. All these three emperors granted the senate’s claim that the emperor should not have the power to condemn a senator to death, and in some aspects the senate seemed to have regained much of its old independence. But Trajan was too masterful and Hadrian too ubiquitous to leave any real scope for senatorial initiative. It was really under these benevolent despots that the Dyarchy ceased to have any significance. As usual the benevolence of the despot was the most fatal enemy to liberty. Not only in Rome but even in the municipalities of Italy politics were ceasing to have any real meaning, and men of standing had to be coerced into taking part in the comedy. The bureaucracy of the imperial palace now governed the world, and the better it governed the more quickly did the life-blood of the Roman world run dry in its veins. We now find imperial “curators” and accountants going up and down the provinces to set their finances in order. Whenever there is trouble in any corner of the earth, an imperial “corrector” travels down from Rome by the admirable system of imperial posts to set it right. Where, of old, a local squire, the patronus of the municipality, would leave a charitable legacy for the maintenance and education of poor children, the state with its admirable system of “alimenta” was beginning to assume the responsibility. The state had its Development Fund which made loans