The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a
charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their
advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed
upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries,
have been set aside, and others of a widely different character
pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper,
and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to
gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer
of the very highest and best class,--as the man who alone thoroughly
understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument
to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose
members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow
the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the
personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the
interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central
government, so far as that work was possible,--thus proceeding in the
spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the
victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars.
This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long
prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references
to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of
American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck
down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in
his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a
truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance
between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman
whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while
Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by
quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834