we shall be preserved ourselves and enable all the rest to survive, but if we wish to examine everything minutely, I fear ill fortune—­but at the very opening of my address I do not wish to say anything displeasing. [-24-] Formerly, not very long ago, those who had arms usually also got control of the government and consequently issued orders to you as to the subjects on which you must deliberate, but you could not look forward and see what it was proper for them to do.  But now practically all conditions are so favorably placed that the matter is in your hands and the responsibility rests upon you; and from your own selves you may obtain either concord and with it liberty, or seditions and civil wars again and a master at the close of them.  Whatever you decide to-day all the rest will follow.  This being the state of the case as I see it, I declare that you ought to abandon your mutual enmities or jealousies or whatever name should be applied to them, and return to that ancient condition of peace and friendship and harmony.  For you should remember this, if nothing else, that so long as we enjoyed that kind of government, we acquired lands, fortunes, glory and allies, but ever since we were led into abusing one another, so far from growing better we have become decidedly worse off.  I am so firmly convinced that nothing else at present could save the city that if we do not to-day, at once, with all possible speed, adopt some policy, we shall never be able to regain our position.

[-25-] “Notice carefully that I am speaking only the truth, of which you may convince yourselves if you regard present conditions and then consider our position in old times.  Do you not see what is taking place,—­that the populace is again being divided and torn asunder and that, some choosing this side, and some that, they have already fallen into two parties and two camps, that the one side has taken timely possession of the Capitol as if they feared the Gauls or somebody, and the other side with headquarters in the Forum is preparing to besiege them and so behaving like Carthaginians, and not as though they too were Romans?  Do you not hear that though formerly citizens often differed, even to the extent of occupying the Aventine once, and the Capitol, and some of them the Sacred Mount, as often as they were reconciled one with another on equal terms (or by yielding but a small point) they at once stopped hating one another, to live the rest of their lives in such peace and harmony that in common they carried through successfully many great wars?  As often, on the other hand, as they had recourse to murders and assassinations, the one side deceived by the justification of defending themselves against the encroachments of the other, and the other side by an ambition to appear to be inferior to none, no good ever came of it.  Why need I waste time by repeating to you, who know them equally well, the names of Valerius, Horatius, Saturninus, Glaucia, the Gracchi?  With such examples before you, not of