“Your life, Caesar, is not that which is bounded by the union of your soul and body.  Your life is that which shall continue fresh in the memory of ages to come, which posterity will cherish and eternity itself keep guard over.  Much has been done by you which men will admire; much remains to be done which they can praise.  They will read with wonder of empires and provinces, of the Rhine, the ocean, and the Nile, of battles without number, of amazing victories, of countless monuments and triumphs; but unless the Commonwealth be wisely re-established in institutions by you bestowed upon us, your name will travel widely over the world, but will have no fixed habitation; and those who come after you will dispute about you as we have disputed.  Some will extol you to the skies; others will find something wanting, and the most important element of all.  Remember the tribunal before which you are to stand.  The ages that are to be will try you, it may be with minds less prejudiced than ours, uninfluenced either by the desire to please you or by envy of your greatness.”

Thus spoke Cicero with heroic frankness.  The ages have “disputed about” Caesar, and will continue to dispute about him, as they do about Cromwell and Napoleon; but the man is nothing to us in comparison with the ideas which he fought or which he supported, and which have the same force to-day as they had nearly two thousand years ago.  He is the representative of imperialism; which few Americans will defend, unless it becomes a necessity which every enlightened patriot admits.  The question is, whether it was or was not a necessity at Rome fifty years before Christ was born.  It is not easy to settle in regard to the benefit that Caesar is supposed by some—­including Mr. Froude and the late Emperor of the French—­to have rendered to the cause of civilization by overturning the aristocratic Constitution, and substituting, not the rule of the people, but that of a single man.  It is still one of the speculations of history; it is not one of its established facts, although the opinions of enlightened historians seem to lean to the necessity of the Caesarian imperialism, in view of the misrule of the aristocracy and the abject venality of the citizens who had votes to sell.  But it must be borne in mind that it was under the aristocratic rule of senators and patricians that Rome went on from conquering to conquer; that the governing classes were at all times the most intelligent, experienced, and efficient in the Commonwealth; that their very vices may have been exaggerated; and that the imperialism which crushed them, may also have crushed out original genius, literature, patriotism, and exalted sentiments, and even failed to have produced greater personal security than existed under the aristocratic Constitution at any period of its existence.  All these are disputed points of history.  It may be that Caesar, far from being a national benefactor by reorganizing the forces of the Empire, sowed the seeds of ruin