to subject their utterance to the control of a censorship.  In neither one way nor the other did Augustus or Nero interfere at all.  From the days of the Republic the system of education had been perfectly untrammelled.  It was simply a matter of arrangement between the parties directly interested, the teacher and the learner.  Neither State nor Church pretended to take any concern in it:  neither priest nor magistrate regarded it with the slightest jealousy.  Public opinion ranged, under ordinary circumstances, in perfect freedom, and under its unchecked influence both the aims and methods of education continued long to be admirably adapted to make intelligent men and useful citizens......  The same indulgence which was extended to education smiled upon the literature which flowed so copiously from it.  There was no restriction upon writing or publication at Rome analogous to our censorships and licensing acts.  The fact that books were copied by the hand, and not printed for general circulation, seems to present no real difficulty to the enforcement of such restrictions, had it been the wish of the government to enforce them.  The noble Roman, indeed, surrounded by freedmen and clients of various ability, by rhetoricians and sophists, poets and declaimers, had within his own doors private aid for executing his literary projects; and when his work was compiled, he had in the slaves of his household the hands for multiplying copies, for dressing and binding them, and sending forth an edition, as we should say, of his work to the select public of his own class or society.  The circulation of compositions thus manipulated might be to some extent surreptitious and secret.  But such a mode of proceeding was necessarily confined to few.  The ordinary writer must have had recourse to a professional publisher, who undertook, as a tradesman, to present his work for profit to the world.  Upon these agents the government might have had all the hold it required:  yet it never demanded the sight beforehand of any speech, essay, or satire which was advertised as about to appear.  It was still content to punish after publication what it deemed to be censurable excesses.  Severe and arbitrary as some of its proceedings were in this respect,... it must be allowed that these prosecutions of written works were rare and exceptional, and that the traces we discover of the freedom of letters, even under the worst of the Emperors, leave on the whole a strong impression of the general leniency of their policy in this particular."[A] This correct picture of the policy of Imperial Rome on this point shows that the ancient sovereigns of the first of empires were more liberal than are modern rulers of their class, and that the Caesars scorned to do that which has been common with the Bonapartes.  The changes in the direction of freedom which Napoleon III. has recently made are really more Caesarean in their character than anything that he had previously done in connection with thought and public discussion.  It ought to be added, however, that the Romans had no daily press, and that journalism, as we understand it, was as unknown to the Caesars as were steamships and rifled cannon.  Had they been troubled with those daily showers of Sibylline leaves that so vex modern potentates, their magnanimity would have been severely tested, and they might have established as severe censorships as ever have been known in Paris or Vienna.