But in every conquered territory it was necessary to have an armed force, large or small according to circumstances, and for the soldiers a general. As all the Roman magistrates were military in the first instance, but also judicial and executive--as, in fact, the nature of Roman ideas of _imperium_ implied an unlimited competence in every department of rule, the provincial general was also, necessarily, a provincial judge and administrator free from all control during his year of office. No doubt the Romans, if they had possessed the wisdom and retrospective foresight so lavishly displayed by their modern critics, would, in sending officers to distant parts, have revised their notions of _imperium_ and defined the spheres of duty which they entrusted to their generals. If they had studied political science they might have learnt that it is wise to separate the legal functions from the administrative, and both from the military. Or if they had made historical researches, they might have discovered that the Persian administrative system of three independent functionaries in each satrapy was the best that had yet been discovered. But they did none of these things: they simply blundered on in the old Roman way, _more maiorum_. They did not foresee the demoralising effect of absolute power in an alien and subject land. They did not foresee the necessity for central control in a Roman Colonial Office; there was not even any Latin equivalent for the Franco-Grecian term “bureaucracy.” Thus they were compelled to trust to the honour and sense of justice which was, when this colossal experiment began, still believed to exist in the heart of a Roman officer and gentleman, unaware that corruption was beginning even then to taint the whole body of their aristocracy. They might, one would think, have realised the super-human temptations in the path of a Roman governor. He went out, with a company of his own friends, chiefly ambitious young men, for a staff, with a senatorial legate chosen by himself, and a juvenile quæstor as his subordinate to keep accounts, if he could: for there was no competitive examination in book-keeping. The governor went for a year only among a people whose traditions, laws, and even language, were probably quite unknown to him. He left an austere and barbarous republic to act as monarch among flattering Greeks or cringing Asiatics. No power on earth could even criticise him while he held the _imperium_: afterwards he might be impeached, it is true, but before a court of his own friends. He had just completed a civic magistracy, and these were won and held by means of lavish bribes and public entertainments. Opportunities to recoup himself were irresistible.