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If the overturning of all constitutional authority by a man who professed to be a reformer, yet who reigned illegally as a despot, can be defended, it is only on the principle of expediency, that the end justifies the means, the plea of the Jesuits, and of all the despots who have overturned constitutions and national liberties. But this is rank and undisguised Caesarism.
Liberty is the strengthening and developing power the light and heat of political nature; and when some 'Caesarism' exhibits as it sometimes will an originality of mind, it is only because it has managed to make its own the products of past free times or neighbouring free countries; and even that originality is only brief and frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation or two, in time of need it falls away.
All this she did, nor loitered in her work either; from the beginning of the nineteenth century the history of civilization is really the history of the last of the class-struggles which was inaugurated by the French Revolution; and England, who all through the times of the Revolution and the Caesarism which followed it appeared to be the steady foe of Revolution, was really as steadily furthering it; her natural conditions, her store of coal and minerals, her temperate climate, extensive sea-board and many harbours, and lastly her position as the outpost of Europe looking into America across the ocean, doomed her to be for a time at least the mistress of the commerce of the civilized world, and its agent with barbarous and semi-barbarous countries.
Among the adherents of Caesarism, none were so devoted as those provincials or freedmen who owed to it their wealth and position. Lucan, as Seneca's nephew, naturally attached himself from the first to the court party. He knew of the Republic only as a name, and, like Ovid, had no reason to be dissatisfied with his own time. Fame, wealth, honours, all were open to him.
When this was written in the year 1857 no one could foresee how soon the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals would save the United States from this fearful trial, and secure the future existence of an absolute self-governing freedom not to be permanently kept in check by any local Caesarism. V. IX. Preparation for Attacks on Caesar Comp.
The prophecy has been made at times that the United States might develop a Caesarism, and certainly the position of president might easily become that of an imperator.
France also kept up the revolutionary and insurrectionary tradition, the result of something like hope still fermenting amongst the proletariat: she fell at last into the clutches of a second Caesarism developed by the basest set of sharpers, swindlers, and harlots that ever insulted a country, and of whom our own happy bourgeois at home made heroes and heroines: the hideous open corruption of Parisian society, to which, I repeat, our respectable classes accorded heartfelt sympathy, was finally swept away by the horrors of a race war: the defeats and disgraces of this war developed, on the one hand, an increase in the wooden implacability and baseness of the French bourgeois, but on the other made way for revolutionary hope to spring again, from which resulted the attempt to establish society on the basis of the freedom of labour, which we call the Commune of Paris of 1871.
Among his writings on these questions, which he was unfortunately obliged to leave unfinished, we may mention a nearly completed history of the early Christian heresies, and of the struggle of Christianity against Caesarism. We have said that, in 1848, Proudhon recognized three masters.
The days of treachery and double-dealing and cowardly revenge were indeed passing away and the new régime was committed to decency and fairplay. The task of the new President was no mean one, and in all the circumstances if he managed to steer a safe middle course and avoid both Caesarism and complete effacement, that is a tribute to his training.
Now, however, he narrowed them agreeably, throwing his square chin up and speaking with closed teeth slightly through the nose, with what he imagined to be the manner of a grand seigneur. In that attitude, he declared suddenly that the highest expression of democracy was Caesarism: the imperial rule based upon the direct popular vote. Caesarism was conservative. It was strong.