The slaveholders whose heart was in their money-bags, the insubordinate soldiers, the generals cowardly, incapable, or foolhardy, the demagogues of the market-place mostly pursuing a mistaken aim, bore their share of the blame; or, to speak more truly, who was there that did not share in it?
It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder were too colossal to be the work of any one man.

As the greatness of the Roman commonwealth was the work not of prominent individuals, but rather of a soundly-organized burgess-body, so the decay of this mighty structure was the result not of the destructive genius of individuals, but of a general disorganization.

The great majority of the burgesses were good for nothing, and every rotten stone in the building helped to bring about the ruin of the whole; the whole nation suffered for what was the whole nation's fault.

It was unjust to hold the government, as the ultimate tangible organ of the state, responsible for all its curable and incurable diseases; but it certainly was true that the government contributed after a very grave fashion to the general culpability.

In the Asiatic war, for example, where no individual of the ruling lords conspicuously failed, and Lucullus, in a military point of view at least, behaved with ability and even glory, it was all the more clear that the blame of failure lay in the system and in the government as such--primarily, so far as that war was concerned, in the remissness with which Cappadocia and Syria were at first abandoned, and in the awkward position of the able general with reference to a governing college incapable of any energetic resolution.