who had been erased from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence, foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers who had not previously received even the equestrian ring, sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades, and other elements of a like kind.  The exclusive circles of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.  Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy; he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.  They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy, and to make it once more—­what it had been in the regal period—­ a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner; just as those earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced non-Italians into his senate.

Personal Government by Caesar

While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly carried out in the administration and government of the state, and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.  First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question of any moment.  Caesar was able to carry personal government to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground in a more general cause.  When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus, and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies, not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time, but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization of the household.  The Roman house was a machine, in which even the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce to the master; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were with countless minds.  It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic centralization; which our counting-house system strives indeed zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system of slavery.  Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage; wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up on principle—­so far as other considerations