Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1890 — Cæsar and Rome. [ARTICLE]

Cæsar and Rome.

The Roman republic up to the time of Julius Ctesar, or a little before, as Mr. Froude has well pointed Out in his &ketoh of Caisar’s life, failed to supply lands and homes- for the neighboring Italian populations which had become truly Roman, and for the soldiery, who disbanded and had to find work or starve. The ancestors of Csesar undertook to establish and enlarge an agrarian law and to take into the merely urban rule of the Roman city the general and intelligent population of Italy and make a peninsular Rome. Caesar saw that the Rom m empire was getting too large to be by the 1 million who lived within the city of Rome and another 3 or 4 million who lived immediately adjacent. But the Roman senate, a patriotic, body like the ruling and respectable families of England, refused to admit these associated Italians into Roman rights and powers. Csesar thereupon, having spent ten years to conquer Gaul and Germany, returned to Rome demanding something of a federation of all those who maintained the Roman arms. Being threatened with destruction ho marched upon Rome, find his enemies leaving it, he was obliged to follow them; and when he reconstructed the senate he put into it not merely ljarlians, but Gauls and barbarians, as had been called, from all the better provinces. In this way an enlarged Rome with a broader basis of representation lasted seVeral centuries longer ; and without that enlargement Rome might have expired anterior to the birth of Jesus Christ, from her civil contentions. —Gath.