Whoever actually should break them,—­well, the result of breaking astral molds is always about the same.  H.P.  Blavatsky said that she came to break molds of mind; and so she did; but it was not in politics; and the while she was laying her trains of thought-dynamite, and exploding them gloriously, she was also building up fair and glorious mansions of thought to house those made homeless.  The situation we are looking at here is on a different plane, the political.  You break the astral molds there; and they may be quite worthless, quite effete and contemptible,—­yet they are the things which alone keep the demon in man under restraint.  It is the old peril of Revolutions.  They may be started with the best of intentions, in the name of the highest ideals; but, unless there be super-human strength (like Ts’in Shi Hwangti’s) or superhuman wisdom (like Augustus’) to guide them, as surely as they succeed in breaking the old molds, they degenerate into orgies,—­blood, vice, and crime.

Augustus effected his revolution and kept all that out; he substituted peace and prosperity for the blood and butchery of a century.  And it was because he went to work with the knowledge of an Occultist that he was able to do so.

He carefully abstained from breaking the molds.  He labored to keep them all intact,—­for the time being, and until new ones should have been formed.  Gently and by degrees he poured a new force and meaning into them; which, in time, would necessarily destroy them; but mean-while others would have been growing.  He took no step without laboriously ascertaining that there were precedents for it.  Rome had been governed by Consuls and Tribunes; well, he would accept the consulate, and the tribuniciary power; because it was necessary now, for the time being at any rate, that Rome should be governed by Augustus.  It is as well to remember that it was the people who insisted on this last.  The Republican Party might subsist among the aristocracy, the old governing class; but Augustus was the hero and champion of the masses.  Time and again he resigned:  handed back his powers to the senate, and what not;—­whether as a matter of form only, and that he might carry opinion along with him; or with the real hope that he had taught things at last to run themselves.  In either case his action was wise and creditable; you have to read into him mean motives out of your own nature, if you think otherwise.  Let there be talk of tyrants, and plots arising, with danger of assassination,—­and what was to become of re-established law, order, and the Augustan Peace?  The fact was that the necessities of the case always compelled the senate to reinstate him:  it was too obvious that things could not run themselves.  If there had been any practicable opposition, it could always have made those resignations effectual; or at least it could have driven him to a show of illegalism, and so, probably, against the point of some fanatic theorist’s dagger.  In 23 B.C. there was a food shortage; and the mob besieged the senate house, demanding that new powers should be bestowed on the Caesar:  they knew well what mind and hands could save them.