upon the manager.  We estimate the importance of Sulla much too highly, or rather we dispose of those terrible proscriptions, ejections, and restorations—­for which there never could be and never was any reparation—­on far too easy terms, when we regard them as the work of a bloodthirsty tyrant whom accident had placed at the head of the state.  These and the terrorism of the restoration were the deeds of the aristocracy, and Sulla was nothing more in the matter than, to use the poet’s expression, the executioner’s axe following the conscious thought as its unconscious instrument.  Sulla carried out that part with rare, in fact superhuman, perfection; but within the limits which it laid down for him, his working was not only grand but even useful.  Never has any aristocracy deeply decayed and decaying still farther from day to day, such as was the Roman aristocracy of that time, found a guardian so willing and able as Sulla to wield for it the sword of the general and the pen of the legislator without any regard to the gain of power for himself.  There is no doubt a difference between the case of an officer who refuses the sceptre from public spirit and that of one who throws it away from a cloyed appetite; but, so far as concerns the total absence of political selfishness—­although, it is true, in this one respect only—­Sulla deserves to be named side by side with Washington.

Value of the Sullan Constitution

But the whole country—­and not the aristocracy merely—­was more indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess.  Sulla definitely terminated the Italian revolution, in so far as it was based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts as compared with others of better rights, and, by compelling himself and his party to recognize the equality of the rights of all Italians in presence of the law, he became the real and final author of the full political unity of Italy—­a gain which was not too dearly purchased by ever so many troubles and streams of blood.  Sulla however did more.  For more than half a century the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her permanent condition:  for the government of the senate with the Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and Carbo was a yet far worse illustration of the absence of a master-hand (the sad image of which is most clearly reflected in that equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most uncertain, most intolerable, and most mischievous of all conceivable political conditions—­in fact the beginning of the end.  We do not go too far when we assert that the long-undermined Roman commonwealth must have necessarily fallen to pieces, had not Sulla by his intervention in Asia and Italy saved its existence.  It is true that the constitution of Sulla had as little endurance as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his structure was no solid one; but it is arrant thoughtlessness