Chapter 3, Excerpt 3 of 3
Rome Discovers Political Structure

He had to take the incoming current and redistribute it outward, so he must not have any other social function. The first man who made it stick did so mainly by that negative qualification. Augustus broke the patricians by proscription, thus reducing the Senate to impotence; put the army on a professional basis; paid of the plebs with the dole and organized a bureaucracy which furnished places and perquisites for the upper and middle class.

For two thousand years the example of Rome has been cited erroneously, to the confusion of nations, as a military empire. It was not. There has never been a military empire, nor ever can be. It is impossible, in the nature of things. An empire can exist only if it offers the world some negotiable benefit in exchange for tribute. The victorious Legions were a result and not a cause. Domestic and political murder were the imperial tutors, instructing the emperor exactly where his power had limits.

The positive reason why the world accepted Rome was that under Roman rule the productive energy already tapped could flow continuously. The flow is commerce, the exchange of surplus products. Roman law affirmed private property, and in the circumstances was bound to be most careful of the citizen; this tended toward individualism. The law was the insulating material of the live current. Roman law was Rome’s export commodity.