disappeared everywhere save in the peninsula of Brittany, the most western part of Gaul. Notwithstanding the large size of the country, the great number of its inhabitants, the ardor of their military spirit, the zeal of their priests for the maintenance of their independence, and the numerous mountains and marshes which gave them strongholds easily defended, ten years put an end to all their hopes of a separate nationality, and all their thoughts of taking revenge upon their conquerors. Samnium, with not one-tenth of the territory, and a population not one-third so large as that of Gaul, though within two days' journey of Rome, and almost surrounded by her allies, fought with terrific desperation, and some great successes, more than a hundred years after it had been conquered. Not so did the Gauls, whose submission and fidelity could not be attributed to indulgent treatment. Indeed it may be said that never was a nationality so great treated with indulgence so Cæsar was not cruel. He did not torture his captives, nor slaughter them to gratify his malice. But the interests of Rome demanded that the Gallic question should be settled forever by the destruction of the Gallic nationality.

scant.

For more than three centuries his countrymen had feared the Gauls as their most dangerous enemies. A large sum of precious metal was stored in the Capitol to be used only in case of a Gallic invasion; and so long as the Gauls were numerous and within a few weeks' march of the Tiber, that peril would continue to exist. Cæsar now found himself in a position to give final relief from that danger; and later times should not say that he had neglected his opportunity. He knew that, with its large population and richer agricultural resources, Gaul, if

once well organized in its political and military affairs, might become much more formidable than either Samnium or Carthage had been, and yet each of those states had brought Rome to the verge of destruction. If, after his time, any Gallic leader should appear before the walls of Rome, as Hannibal and Caius Pontius had done, the blame might be thrown on the memory of Cæsar. He saw that the interests of his country demanded that the decisive struggle should not be delayed; that it should be brought on before the Gauls fortified their towns; before they acquired a dense population; before they had made much additional progress in the accumulation of wealth; before they had learned to combine their forces; and before they had come under the control of some great military leader.

His personal interests harmonized with the interests of his country. He must conquer Gaul to obtain a large army, to get the affection of his soldiers, to acquire wealth, to gain a reputation that would put him on a level with Pompey as a general, and to give the Roman rabble such confidence in him that they would aid him to become dictator.

With such motives, it is highly probable that Cæsar purposely irritated the Gauls and drove them into hostilities, again and again, until he had slain 1,000,000 of their men, and deported as many slaves, out of a total population which perhaps did not exceed 4,500,000. The Gauls left in the country were mostly women and girls. Cæsar established a large number of Romans, who took possession of the lands and women; and the natural result was that the next generation had ceased to be Gauls in speech, manners, modes of life, and feelings.

SEC. 466, Anarchy.—The Roman republic had reached

the end of its career. Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Marius, Cinna, Sulla, and Pompey, had each held despotic power, and no one had established an orderly government on a durable basis. Two generations had lived in almost continuous confusion. The senate and tribal assembly could not work together in harmony, and neither was strong enough to abolish the other permanently. Nor was either fit to rule. There was no influential middle class to restrain them.

Excluded from trade and from every profitable occupation in the city, and yet required to live in grand style and to support a multitude of dependents, the nobles generally derived most of their income from booty in war and from provincial plunder in peace. These sources of wealth were demoralizing. They could not be used with much effect except by men who disregarded the rights and feelings of their fellow-men. The result was that the Roman nobles were among the most cruel rulers the world has ever seen.

In the late republic, the populace of Rome were worthy associates of the nobles. They were the most ignorant and most brutal rabble known to history. They had less industrial skill and they did less work than any other populace. They had less respect for themselves and less regard for the rights of others. Their greatest delight was to see their fellow-men slaughter one another. They were the largest mass of paupers ever brought together.

Republican Rome never had an efficient police force. Every curule officer had half a dozen men or more to serve as his attendants and bailiffs, but they were attached to the man, not to the state. They belonged to no common organization; they were not subject to any general rules emanating from a central authority. They

were appointed for brief terms, not long enough to give them a good official education. The criminal laws were very rude; and without a precise code of police regulations and permanently organized courts, there can not be a good police administration.

Partisan riots and political assassinations were very frequent, and were rarely, if ever, properly punished. Seldom, indeed, were they made subjects of judicial investigation. While Cæsar was in Gaul, two of the most prominent men in Rome, Clodius on the side of the mob and Milo on the side of the senate, kept bands of gladiators, to protect them in street fights. Cato, the younger, also had his similar band. No court interfered with these evils; the senate had no remedy for them. The republic could not protect its honor against such gross insults.

No government in any other great state, in any period of the world, has ever been so disorderly during so long a period as that of Rome from 130 to 50 B. C. Beesley says: “A more repulsive picture can hardly be imagined. A mob, a moneyed class, and an aristocracy almost equally worthless, hating each other and hated by the rest of the world; Italians bitterly jealous of Romans and only in better plight than the provinces beyond the sea; more miserable than either, swarms of slaves beginning to brood over revenge as a solace to their sufferings; the land going out of cultivation; native industry swamped by slave-grown imports; the population decreasing; the army degenerating; wars waged as a speculation, but only against the weak; provinces subjected to organized pillage; in the metropolis, childish superstition, wholesale luxury, and monstrous vice."

About 1854, while slavery still existed in New Orleans,

and the Papal government still held possession of Rome, Mommsen wrote that "if we conceive a London with the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory [of Rome about 45 B. C.] the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.""

This is an impressive picture, but it conveys a very inadequate idea of the most frightful features in the social and political condition of the Eternal City. The slave population there was far more vicious and probably much larger relatively than in New Orleans. The political agitation should be compared to that of Paris, not in 1848, but in 1793, an agitation not limited to a struggle for bread and office, but embittered by the most horrid slaughter. The Rome of 50 B. C. was what Paris would have been in 1875 if the French republic of 1793 had continued for eighty years. No other great city has equaled or even approached the long continuation of the frightful disorders of Rome in the last century of the republic. The cruelty of Nero, and the fury of Commodus, were mild, and merciful, and brief in comparison.

No historian ventures to commend the government of the republic in its later years. According to Mahaffy, it was "the worst tyranny the world had ever seen.” In the mind of Ihne it provoked "indignation and disgust." Merivale thought it “frightful in its political immorality.” In the description of Mommsen it was "the saturnalia of the canaille," the frenzied fury of a degraded populace. To Savigny it was iniquitous. To Froude its treatment of the provinces suggested “the squeezing of a sponge,"