by guarantees, to the amount of nearly two hundred thousand pounds. And
at another he was accustomed to amuse himself with computing how much
money it would require to make him worth exactly nothing (_i.e._ simply
to clear him of debts); this, by one account, amounted to upwards of two
millions sterling. Now, the error of historians has been to represent
these debts as the original ground of his ambition and his revolutionary
projects, as though the desperate condition of his private affairs had
suggested a civil war to his calculations as the best or only mode of
redressing it. Such a policy would have resembled the last desperate
resource of an unprincipled gambler, who, on seeing his final game at
chess, and the accumulated stakes depending upon it, all on the brink of
irretrievable sacrifice, dexterously upsets the chess-board, or
extinguishes the lights. But Julius, the one sole patriot of Rome, could
find no advantage to his plans in darkness or in confusion. Honestly
supported, he would have crushed the oligarchies of Rome by crushing in
its lairs that venal and hunger-bitten democracy which made oligarchy
and its machineries resistless. Caesar's debts, far from being
stimulants and exciting causes of his political ambition, stood in an
inverse relation to the ambition; they were its results, and represented
its natural costs, being contracted from first to last in the service of
his political intrigues, for raising and maintaining a powerful body of
partisans, both in Rome and elsewhere. Whosoever indeed will take the
trouble to investigate the progress of Caesar's ambition, from such
materials as even yet remain, may satisfy himself that the scheme of
revolutionizing the Republic, and placing himself at its head, was no
growth of accident or circumstances; above all, that it did not arise
upon any so petty and indirect a suggestion as that of his debts; but
that his debts were in their very first origin purely ministerial to his
wise, indispensable, and patriotic ambition; and that his revolutionary
plans were at all periods of his life a direct and foremost object, but