privileges; we recognise in them, and that gratefully, the destroyers of that aristocratic rule which gave the people for the hardest service the least possible payment; we praise them as worldly saviours who, humiliating the lofty and exalting the lowly, introduced a civic equality. That advocate of the past, the patrician Tacitus, may describe as he will the private vices and mad freaks of the Cæsars with the most poetic poison, we know better things of them—they fed the people.[1]
It was Cæsar who led the Roman aristocracy to ruin, and prepared the victory of democracy. Meanwhile there were many old patricians who still cherished in their hearts the spirit of republicanism; they could not endure the supremacy of a single man, they would not live where one raised his head above all theirs, even though it were the lordly head of Julius Cæsar so they whetted their daggers and slew him.
Democracy and monarchy are not enemies, as people falsely assert, in these our times. The best democracy will ever be that where one person stands as incarnation of the popular will at the
- ↑ That is to say that on the evil principle of unlimited "out-of-door relief," they, like the monks of later date with their doles, deliberately created an army of incurable paupers, who were thereby forced into being retainers and partisans. They plundered the world to feed a lazy mob of Roman citizens.—Translator.
