his fall, a proof, perhaps, of the soundness of the provinces.  For when they felt the shame of his conduct, they rose and put him down; Roman Gaul and Germany and Spain and the East did.  Here is a curious indication:  Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, who made such a sorry thing of the two years (68 and 69) they shared in the Principate, had each done well as a provincial governor.  In the provinces, then, the Tiberian tradition of honest efficient government suffered not much, if any, interruption.  The fact that Rome itself stood the nine years of Nero’s criminal insanity,—­and even, so far as the mob was concerned, liked it (for his grave was long kept strewn with flowers)—­shows what a people can fall to, that the Crest-Wave had first made rotten, and then left soulless.

By the beginning of 70, things were comfortably in the hands of Vespasian, another provincial governor; under whom, and his son Titus after him, there were twelve years of dignified government; and seven more of the same, and then seven or eight of tyranny, under his second son, Domitian.  Against the first two of these Flavians nothing is to be said except that the rise of their house to the Principate was by caprice of the soldiery.  Vespasian was an honest Sabine, fond of retiring to his native farm; he brought in much good provincial blood with him into Roman society.—­Then in 96 came a revolution which placed the aged senator Nerva on the throne; who set before himself the definite policy—­as it was intended he should—­of replacing personal caprice by legality and constitutionalism as the instrument of government.  He reigned two years, and left the empire to Trajan; who was strong enough as a general to hold his position, and as a statesman, to establish the principles of Nerva.  And so things began to expand again; and a new strength became evident, the like of which had not been seen since (at least) the death of Tiberius.

Octavian returned to Rome, sole Master of the world, in B.C. 29.  A half-cycle on from that brings us to 36 A.D., the year before Tiberius died:  that half-cycle was one, for the Empire all of it, and for Rome most of it, of bright daylight.  The next half-cycle ends in 101, in the third year of Trajan:  a time, for the most part, of decline, of twilight.  You will notice that the Han day lasted the full thirteen decades before twilight came; the Roman, but six decades and a half.

We ought to understand just how far this second Roman half-cycle was an age of decline:  just how much darkneww suffused the twilight it was.  We talk of representative government; as if any government were ever really anything else.  Men get the government that represents them; that represent their intelligence, or their laxity, or their vices:—­whether it be sent in by the ballot or by a Praetorian Guard with their caprice and spears.  In a pralayic time there is no keen national consciousness, no centripetalism.  There was none in Rome in those days; or not enough