the
few which had been decided at Pharsalus and Philippi. The Romans upheld
the absolutism of the Empire because it was their own. The elementary
antagonism between liberty and democracy, between the welfare of
minorities and the supremacy of masses, became manifest. The friend of
the one was a traitor to the other. The dogma, that absolute power may,
by the hypothesis of a popular origin, be as legitimate as
constitutional freedom, began, by the combined support of the people and
the throne, to darken the air.

Legitimate, in the technical sense of modern politics, the Empire was
not meant to be. It had no right or claim to subsist apart from the will
of the people. To limit the Emperor's authority was to renounce their
own; but to take it away was to assert their own. They gave the Empire
as they chose. They took it away as they chose. The Revolution was as
lawful and as irresponsible as the Empire. Democratic institutions
continued to develop. The provinces were no longer subject to an
assembly meeting in a distant capital. They obtained the privileges of
Roman citizens. Long after Tiberius had stripped the inhabitants of Rome
of their electoral function, the provincials continued in undisturbed
enjoyment of the right of choosing their own magistrates. They governed
themselves like a vast confederation of municipal republics; and, even
after Diocletian had brought in the forms as well as the reality of
despotism, provincial assemblies, the obscure germ of representative
institutions, exercised some control over the Imperial officers.

But the Empire owed the intensity of its force to the popular fiction.
The principle, that the Emperor is not subject to laws from which he can
dispense others, _princeps legibus solutus_, was interpreted to imply
that he was above all legal restraint. There was no appeal from his
sentence. He was the living law. The Roman jurists, whilst they adorned
their writings with the exalted philosophy of the Stoics, consecrated
every excess of Imperial prerogative with those famous maxims which have
been balm to so many consciences and have sanctioned so much wrong; and
the code of Justinian became the greatest obstacle, next to feudalism,
with which liberty had to contend.

Ancient democracy, as it was in Athens in the best days of Pericles, or
in Rome when Polybius described it, or even as it is idealised by
Aristotle in the Sixth Book of his _Politics_, and by Cicero in the
beginning of