charged with insuring universal felicity by administrative means. The movement was supported by intellectual men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial aptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of these bureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weaker with the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empire was bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman in statesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitan bureaucracy of men of brains: orators, litterati, lawyers. Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that the imperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, the formation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences of that natural unification, the chief reason for which should be sought in the great economic movement. The economic unification was first and was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperial bureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of material
