Let us leave those dregs of the population, whose civil existence the law ignored, and who counted in politics but as the formidable tool of designing individuals of free birth. But does not the free population of Rome afford a perfect analogue to a modern body politic? There is the mob crying for bread, greedy of shows, flattery, gratuitous distributions, and amusements; the middle classes (_bourgeoisie_) monopolizing and dividing among themselves the public offices; the hereditary aristocracy, continually assailed at all points, continually losing ground, until driven in mere self-defence to abjure all superior claims and stipulate for equal rights to all. Are not these perfect resemblances? Among the boundless variety of opinions that make themselves heard in our day, there is not one that had not advocates in Rome. I alluded a while ago to the letters written from the villa of Tusculum; they express the sentiments of the Roman conservative _Progressist_ party. By the side of Sylla, Pompey and Cicero were Radicals.[176] Their notions were not sufficiently radical for Cæsar; too much so for Cato. At a later period we find in Pliny the younger a mild royalist, a friend of quiet, even at some cost. Apprehensive of too much liberty, yet jealous of power too absolute; very practical in his views, caring but little for the poetical splendor of the age of the Fabii, he preferred the more prosaic administration of Trajan. There were others not of his opinion, good people who feared an insurrection headed by some new Spartacus, and who, therefore, thought that the Emperor could not hold the reins too tight. Then there were others, from the provinces, who obstreperously demanded and obtained what would now be called "constitutional guaranties." Again, there were the socialists, and their views found no less an expounder than the Gallic Cæsar, C. Junius Posthumus, who exclaims: "Dives et pauper, inimici," the rich and the poor are enemies born. Every man who had any pretensions to participate in the lights of the day, declaimed on the absolute equality of all men, their "inalienable rights," the manifest necessity and ultimate universality of the Greco-Latin civilization, its superiority, its mildness, its future progress, much greater even than that actually made, and above all its perpetuity. Nor were those ideas merely the pride and consolation of the pagans; they were the firm hopes and expectations of the earliest and most illustrious Fathers of the Church, whose sentiments found so eloquent an interpreter in Tertullian. * * * * *