Returning to Rome he went through the usual course of honors, always discharging his duties with the utmost zeal and integrity, and probably, as long as he filled a subordinate place, with great success.  It was when statesmanship was wanted that he began to fail.

In the affair of the conspiracy of Catiline Cato stood firmly by Cicero, supporting the proposition to put the conspirators to death in a powerful speech, the only speech of all that he made that was preserved.  This preservation was due to the forethought of Cicero, who put the fastest writers whom he could find to relieve each other in taking down the oration.  This, it is interesting to be told, was the beginning of shorthand.

Cato, like Cicero, loved and believed in the republic; but he was much more uncompromising, more honest perhaps we may say, but certainly less discreet in putting his principles into action.  He set himself to oppose the accumulation of power in the hands of Pompey and Caesar; but he lacked both dignity and prudence, and he accomplished nothing.  When, for instance, Caesar, returning from Spain, petitioned the Senate for permission to become a candidate for the consulship without entering the city—­to enter the city would have been to abandon his hopes of a triumph—­Cato condescended to use the arts of obstruction in opposing him.  He spoke till sunset against the proposition, and it failed by sheer lapse of time.  Yet the opposition was fruitless.  Caesar of course abandoned the empty honor, and secured the reality, all the more certainly because people felt that he had been hardly used.  And so he continued to act, always seeking to do right, but always choosing the very worst way of doing it; anxious to serve his country, but always contriving to injure it.  Even in that which, we may say, best became him in his life, in the leaving of it (if we accept for the moment the Roman view of the morality of suicide), he was not doing his best for Rome.  Had he been willing to live (for Caesar was ready to spare him, as he was always ready to spare enemies who could not harm him), there was yet good for him to do; in his hasty impatience of what he disapproved, he preferred to deprive his country of its most honest citizen.

We must not omit a picture so characteristic of Roman life as the story of his last hours.  The last army of the republic had been destroyed at Thapsus, and Caesar was undisputed master of the world.  Cato vainly endeavored to stir up the people of Utica, a town near Carthage, in which he had taken up his quarters; when they refused, he resolved to put an end to his life.  A kinsman of Caesar, who was preparing to intercede with the conqueror for the lives of the vanquished leaders, begged Cato’s help in revising his speech.  “For you,” he said, “I should think it no shame to clasp his hands and fall at his knees.”  “Were I willing to take my life at his hands,” replied Cato, “I should go alone to ask it.  But