Imperial regime are new men, most of whose names were never heard of until the present century.  The Imperial family, too, unlike that of Rome, is a new family.  The democratic revolution of Rome, which led to the fall of the Republic, was enabled to triumph only because the movement was headed by one of the noblest-born of Romans, a patrician of the bluest blood, who claimed descent from Venus, and from the last of the Trojan heroes.  No Roman had a loftier lineage than “the mighty Julius”; and when the place of Augustus passed to Tiberius, the third Emperor represented the Claudian gens, the most arrogant, overbearing, haughty, and cruel of all those patrician gentes that figure in the history of the republican times.  He belonged, too, to the family of Nero, which was to the rest of the Claudian gens what that gens was to other men,—­the representative of all that is peculiarly detestable in an oligarchical fraternity.  The French Caesars are emphatically novi homines, the founder of their greatness not being in existence a century ago, and born of a poor family, which had never made any impression on history.  There are abundant points of contrast to be found, when we examine the origin of Imperial Rome in connection with the origin of Imperial France, but few of resemblance.

Even in the bad elements of the modern Imperial rule there is little imitation of that of the Caesars.  “The ordinary notion of absolute government, derived from the form it assumes in Europe at the present day,” says Merivale, “is that of a strict system of prevention, which, by means of a powerful army, an ubiquitous police, and a censorship of letters, anticipates every manifestation of freedom in thought or action, from whence inconvenience may arise to it.  But this was not the system of the Caesarean Empire.  Faithful to the traditions of the Free State, Augustus had quartered all his armies on the frontiers, and his successors were content with concentrating, cohort by cohort, a small, though trusty force, for their own protection in the capital.  The legions were useful to the Emperor, not as instruments for the repression of discontent at home, but as faithful auxiliaries among whom the most dangerous of his nobles might be relegated, in posts which were really no more than honorable exiles.  Nor was the regular police of the city an engine of tyranny.  Volunteers might be found in every rank to perform the duty of spies; but it was apparently no part of the functions of the enlisted guardians of the streets to watch the countenances of the citizens, or beset their privacy.  We hear of no intrusion into private assemblies, no dispersion of crowds in the streets......  They [the Emperors] made no effort to impose restraints upon thought.  Freedom of thought may be checked in two ways, and modern despotism resorts in its restless jealousy to both.  The one is, to guide ideas by seizing on the channels of education; the other,