wise thing, which senators opposed, since it took away their monopoly.  Another act required the provincial governors, on their return from office, to render an account of their stewardship and hand in their accounts for public inspection.  The Julian Laws also were designed to prevent the plunder of the public revenues, the debasing of the coin, the bribery of judges and of the people at elections.  There were laws also for the protection of citizens from violence, and sundry other reforms which were enlightened and useful.  In the passage of these laws against the will of the Senate, we see that the people were still recognized as sovereign in legislation.  The laws were good.  All depended on their execution; and the Senate, as the administrative body, could practically defeat their operation when Caesar’s term of office expired; and this it unwisely determined to do.  The last thing it wished was any reform whatever; and, as Mr. Froude thinks, there must have been either reform or revolution.  But this is not so clear to me.  Aristocracy was all-powerful when money could buy the people, and when the people had no virtue, no ambition, no intelligence.  The struggle at Rome in the latter days of the Republic was not between the people and the aristocracy, but between the aristocracy and the military chieftains on one side, and those demagogues whom it feared on the other.  The result showed that the aristocracy feared and distrusted Caesar; and he used the people only to advance his own ends,—­of course, in the name of reform and patriotism.  And when he became Dictator, he kicked away the ladder on which he climbed to power.  It was Imperialism that he established; neither popular rights nor aristocratic privileges.  He had no more love of the people than he had of those proud aristocrats who afterwards murdered him.

But the empire of the world—­to which Caesar at that time may, or may not, have aspired:  who can tell? but probably not—­was not to be gained by civil services, or reforms, or arguments in law courts, or by holding great offices, or haranguing the people at the rostrum, or making speeches in the Senate,—­where he was hated for his liberal views and enlightened mind, rather than from any fear of his overturning the constitution,—­but by military services and heroic deeds and the devotion of a tried and disciplined regular army.  Caesar was now forty-three years of age, being in the full maturity of his powers.  At the close of his term as Consul he sought a province where military talents were indispensable, and where he could have a long term of office.  The Senate gave him the “woods and forests,”—­an unsubdued country, where he would have hard work and unknown perils, and from which it was probable he would never return.  They sent him to Gaul.  But this was just the field for his marvellous military genius, then only partially developed; and the second period of his career now began.