The one man with genius and creativeness adequate to restore a practical republican government was Cæsar himself, and to him republican ideals meant nothing. He was a realistic statesman, who saw the road to monarchy as the short cut to good government, and took it unhesitatingly. At no point in Cæsar’s career is there any evidence that he believed in anything but personal rule. Alike skeptical of higher appeals and with a contempt for shams, he never wavered at any stage in his well-planned pursuit of autocratic power. His fight with the Senatorial oligarchy, who alone blocked his way, was conducted with the directness of a military campaign. There was little personal feeling, for he treated men as pawns, whether they were friends or enemies. When their power to help or to oppose him was gone, they were of no significance; so, at the close of the civil war, it was easy to exercise a clemency or a patronage which meant little. There was a superficial amiability in these acts which indicated a contempt of individuals rather than spontaneous humanity. His cold, clear-cut character seemed to work out problems in a bloodless atmosphere alike free from prejudices and from prepossessions. Cæsar’s benefactions and his enmities were alike self-centered. The whole force of a nature extraordinarily versatile and incessantly active was turned to one end, and the various stages of his political career are explained by the closing years of his life. It was his purpose to overthrow the Senatorial aristocrats. The purpose was a most worthy one, and it is difficult to see how it could have been done except by extra-legal means, for the Senatorial faction made the laws, and so held all the cards in their hands. Their motto of government was “Heads I win, tails you lose”; and the claim of legality with such a leader as Pompeius, who had no respect for the constitution, was altogether disingenuous. Cæsar was a shrewder politician than any member of the Senatorial faction, far more brilliant in conception and far quicker in action than his rival Pompeius. After clearing the field of his opponents, he showed less creative capacity than in his preparatory work. Of course, the time was short between his murder and the close of the last campaign in the civil war, but the government he established was a kind of sham republicanism after the Sullan model, only with a different center of gravity. He seems to have planned a better system of administration, and meant that it should be worked in a way regardful of the public interests of a great empire; but the machinery was to remain the same, except that the various magistracies were either to be held by himself or filled by men of his own selection. The shadow of republicanism was to cover a monarchical rule, and in this respect the conservatism of Cæsar was epoch-making, for it continued to influence the whole genius of the Roman imperial system for centuries.