And nobly had he won it. The views of the conspiracy frustrated; the hearts of its leaders chilled and thunder-stricken; the loyalty and virtue of all classes aroused; the eyes of the Roman people opened to knowledge of their friends; two wise and noble consuls chosen, by who were on the point of casting their votes for a murderer and traitor; the city saved from conflagration; the commonwealth preserved, in all its majesty; these were the trophies of the Consular Comitia. CHAPTER III. _THE PERIL._ Things, bad begun, make strong themselves by ill. MACBETH. Sixteen days had elapsed, since the conspirators were again frustrated at the Consular Comitia. Yet not for that had the arch-traitor withdrawn his foot one hair’s breadth from his purpose, or paused one moment in his career of crime and ruin. There is, beyond doubt, a necessity—not as the ancients deemed, supernatural, and the work of fate, but a natural moral necessity—arising from the very quality of crime itself, which spurs the criminal on to new guilt, fresh atrocity. In the dark path of wickedness there is no halting place; the wretched climber must turn his face for ever upward, for ever onward; if he look backward his fall is inevitable, his doom fixed. So was it proved with Catiline. To gain impunity for his first deed of cruelty and blood, another and another were forced on him, until at last, harassed and maddened by the consciousness of untold guilt, his frantic spirit could find no respite, save in the fierce intoxication of excitement, the strange delight of new atrocity. Add to this, that, knowing himself anticipated and discovered, he knew also that if spared for a time by his opponent, it was no lack of will, but lack of opportunity alone to crush him, that held the hands of Cicero inactive. Thus, although for a time the energies of his weaker comrades sank paralysed by the frustration of their schemes, and by the certainty that they were noted and observed even in their most secret hours, his stronger and more vehement spirit found only in the greater danger the greater stimulus to action. Sixteen days had elapsed, and gradually, as the conspirators found that no steps were taken by the government for their apprehension or punishment, they too waxed bolder, and began to fancy, in their insolent presumption, that the republic was too weak or too timid to enforce its own laws upon undoubted traitors. All the causes, moreover, which had urged them at first to councils so desperate, existed undiminished, nay, exaggerated by delay. Their debts, their inability to raise those funds which their boundless profusion rendered necessary, still maddened them; and to these the consciousness of detected guilt, and that "necessity which," in the words of their chief, "makes even the timid brave," were superadded.