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Beach's little pamphlet sheds the utmost light upon the economic era preceding the Civil War. It really pictures an industrial organization that belongs as much to ancient history as the empire of the Caesars. His study lists about one thousand of New York's "wealthy citizens."
"You will have noticed," he resumed, "that the Caesars didn't build yonder. And that was evidently because they had to respect some very ancient monuments dating from before the foundation of the city and greatly venerated by the people.
The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad enterprise.
Coming to the tenth in succession, Vespasian, and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, who make up the list of the twelve Caesars, as they are usually called, we find matter for deeper political meditation and subjects of curious research.
It may remind us of the similar institutions of ancient Rome, when, under the Caesars, she was mistress of half the world. A principal design of the great roads was to serve the purposes of military communication. It formed an important item of their military policy, which is quite as well worth studying as their municipal.
The Queen of Palmyra was once but the Queen of Palmyra; she is now Queen of Egypt and of the East Augusta of the Roman empire her sons styled and arrayed as Caesars. By whatever consent of former emperors these honors have been won or permitted, it is not, we are required to say, with the consent of Aurelian.
Time after time the Senate appealed to Honorius to shew himself, at least, to his Roman subjects, since political reasons were against his dwelling among them. This journey was always put off. The truth is, the Christian Caesars did not like Rome, and mistrusted her still half-pagan Senate and people. It needed this unhoped-for victory to bring Honorius and his councillors to make up their minds.
A vast empire rises on my view, greater than that of Caesars and conquerors an empire durable and universal in the souls of men, that time itself cannot overthrow; and Death marches with me, side by side, and the skeleton hand waves me back to the nothingness of common men." He paused at the casement he threw it open, and leant forth and gasped for air.
Suetonius, born about the year A.D. 70, shortly after Nero's death, was rather a biographer than historian. Nor as a biographer does he take a high rank. His "Lives of the Caesars," like Diogenes Laertius' "Lives of the Philosophers," are rather anecdotical than historical.
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