magistrates in some degree feared the gods and the senate, and for the most part were moderate in their plundering; but they plundered withal, and did so with impunity, if they but observed such moderation.  The mischievous rule became established, that in the case of minor exactions and moderate violence the Roman magistrate acted in some measure within his sphere and was in law exempt from punishment, so that those who were aggrieved had to keep silence; and from this rule succeeding ages did not fail to draw the fatal consequences.  Nevertheless, even though the tribunals had been as strict as they were lax, the liability to a judicial reckoning could only check the worst evils.  The true security for a good administration lay in a strict and uniform supervision by the supreme administrative authority:  and this the senate utterly failed to provide.  It was in this respect that the laxity and helplessness of the collegiate government became earliest apparent.  By right the governors ought to have been subjected to an oversight far more strict and more special than had sufficed for the administration of Italian municipal affairs; and now, when the empire embraced great transmarine territories, the arrangements, through which the government preserved to itself the supervision of the whole, ought to have undergone a corresponding expansion.  In both respects the reverse was the case.  The governors ruled virtually as sovereign; and the most important of the institutions serving for the latter purpose, the census of the empire, was extended to Sicily alone, not to any of the provinces subsequently acquired.  This emancipation of the supreme administrative officials from the central authority was more than hazardous.  The Roman governor, placed at the head of the armies of the state, and in possession of considerable financial resources:  subject to but a lax judicial control, and practically independent of the supreme administration; and impelled by a sort of necessity to separate the interest of himself and of the people whom he governed from that of the Roman community and to treat them as conflicting, far more resembled a Persian satrap than one of the commissioners of the Roman senate at the time of the Samnite wars.  The man, moreover, who had just conducted a legalized military tyranny abroad, could with difficulty find his way back to the common civic level, which distinguished between those who commanded and those who obeyed, but not between masters and slaves.  Even the government felt that their two fundamental principles—­equality within the aristocracy, and the subordination of the power of the magistrates to the senatorial college—­began in this instance to give way in their hands.  The aversion of the government to the acquisition of new provinces and to the whole provincial system; the institution of the provincial quaestorships, which were intended to take at least the financial power out of the hands of the governors; and the abolition