Nor is it correct to believe that this policy was easy.  Moderation and passivity, even when good for the governed, rust and waste away governments, which must always be doing something, even if it be only making mistakes.  In fact, while supreme power usually brings return and much return to him who exercises it, especially in monarchies, it cost instead, and unjustly, to Augustus and Tiberius.  Augustus had to offer to the monster, as Tiberius called the Empire, almost all his family, beginning with the beloved Julia, and had to spend for the state almost all his fortune.  We know that although in the last twenty years of his life he received by many bequests a sum amounting to a billion and four hundred million sesterces, he left his heirs only one hundred and fifty million sesterces, all the rest having been spent by him for the Republic:  this was the singular civil list of this curious monarch, who, instead of fleecing his subjects, spent for them almost all he had.  It is vain to speak of Tiberius:  the Empire cost him the only thing that perhaps he held dear, his fame.  A philosophic history would be wrong in not recognising the grandeur of these sacrifices, which are the last glory of the Roman nobility.  The old political spirit of the Roman nobility gave to Augustus and Tiberius the strength to make these sacrifices, and they probably saved ancient civilisation from a most difficult crisis.

It may be observed that Augustus and Tiberius worked for the Empire and the future without realising it.  Far from understanding that the economic progress of their time would unify the Empire better than could their laws and their legions, they feared it; they believed that it would everywhere diffuse “corruption,” even in the armies, and therefore weaken the imperial power of resistance against the barbarians on the Rhine and the Danube.  The German peril—­the future had luminously to demonstrate it—­was much less than Augustus and Tiberius believed.  In other words, the first two emperors thought that the unity of the Empire would be maintained by a vigorous, solid army, while the economic progress, which spread “corruption,” appeared to them to put it to risk.

Exactly the opposite happened; the army continued to decay, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Tiberius, while the inner force of economic interests held the countries well bound together.  It is impossible to oppose this course of reasoning, in itself most accurate; but what conclusion is to be drawn from it?  In the chaotic conflict of passions and interests that make up the world, the deeds of a man or a party are not useful in proportion to the objective truth of the ideas acted out, or to the success attained.  Their usefulness depends upon the direction of the effort, on the ends it proposes, on the results it obtains.  There are men and parties of whom one might say, they were right to be wrong, when chimerical ideas and mistakes have sustained their courage to carry out an effective effort; there are others, instead, of whom it might be said that they were wrong to be right, when their clear vision of present and past kept them from accomplishing some painful but necessary duty.