of
measures that were neither violent nor injurious.

The Empire preserved the Republican forms until the reign of Diocletian;
but the will of the Emperors was as uncontrolled as that of the people
had been after the victory of the Tribunes. Their power was arbitrary
even when it was most wisely employed, and yet the Roman Empire rendered
greater services to the cause of liberty than the Roman Republic. I do
not mean by reason of the temporary accident that there were emperors
who made good use of their immense opportunities, such as Nerva, of whom
Tacitus says that he combined monarchy and liberty, things otherwise
incompatible; or that the Empire was what its panegyrists declared it,
the perfection of Democracy. In truth it was at best an ill-disguised
and odious despotism. But Frederic the Great was a despot; yet he was a
friend to toleration and free discussion. The Bonapartes were despotic;
yet no liberal ruler was ever more acceptable to the masses of the
people than the First Napoleon, after he had destroyed the Republic, in
1805, and the Third Napoleon at the height of his power in 1859. In the
same way, the Roman Empire possessed merits which, at a distance, and
especially at a great distance of time, concern men more deeply than the
tragic tyranny which was felt in the neighbourhood of the Palace. The
poor had what they had demanded in vain of the Republic. The rich fared
better than during the Triumvirate. The rights of Roman citizens were
extended to the people of the provinces. To the imperial epoch belong
the better part of Roman literature and nearly the entire Civil Law; and
it was the Empire that mitigated slavery, instituted religious
toleration, made a beginning of the law of nations, and created a
perfect system of the law of property. The Republic which Caesar
overthrew had been anything but a free State. It provided admirable
securities for the rights of citizens; it treated with savage disregard
the rights of men; and allowed the free Roman to inflict atrocious
wrongs on his children, on debtors and dependants, on prisoners and
slaves. Those deeper ideas of right and duty, which are not found on the
tables of municipal law, but with which the generous minds of Greece
were conversant, were held of little account, and the philosophy which
dealt with such speculations was repeatedly proscribed, as a teacher of
sedition and impiety.

At length, in the year 155, the Athenian philosopher Carneades appe