everywhere masters, and dependent upon the emperor alone.  By his incontestable and admitted superiority, Diocletian remained the soul of these two bodies.  At the end of eight years he saw that the two empires were still too vast; and to each Augustus he added a Caesar,—­Galerius and Constantius Chlorus,—­who, save a nominal, rather than real, subordination to the two emperors, had, each in his own state, the imperial power with the same administrative system.  In this partition of the Roman world, Gaul had the best of it:  she had for master, Constantius Chlorus, a tried warrior, but just, gentle, and disposed to temper the exercise of absolute power with moderation and equity.  He had a son, Constantine, at this time eighteen years of age, whom he was educating carefully for government as well as for war.  This system of the Roman empire, thus divided between four masters, lasted thirteen years; still fruitful in wars and in troubles at home, but without victories, and with somewhat less of anarchy.  In spite of this appearance of success and durability, absolute power failed to perform its task; and, weary of his burden and disgusted with the imperfection of his work, Diocletian abdicated A.D. 303.  No event, no solicitations of his old comrades in arms and empire, could draw him from his retreat on his native soil of Salona, in Dalmatia.  “If you could see the vegetables planted by these hands,” said he to Maximian and Galerius, “you would not make the attempt.”  He had persuaded or rather dragged his first colleague, Maximian, into abdication after him; and so Galerius in the East, and Constantius Chlorus in the West, remained sole emperors.  After the retirement of Diocletian, ambitions, rivalries, and intrigues were not slow to make head; Maximian reappeared on the scene of empire, but only to speedily disappear (A.D. 310), leaving in his place his son Maxentius.  Constantius Chlorus had died A.D. 306, and his son, Constantine, had immediately been proclaimed by his army Caesar and Augustus.  Galerius died A.D. 311 and Constantine remained to dispute the mastery with Maxentius in the West, and in the East with Maximinus and Licinius, the last colleagues taken by Diocletian and Galerius.  On the 29th of October, A.D. 312, after having gained several battles against Maxentius in Italy, at Milan, Brescia, and Verona, Constantine pursued and defeated him before Rome, on the borders of the Tiber, at the foot of the Milvian bridge; and the son of Maximian, drowned in the Tiber, left to the son of Constantins Chlorus the Empire of the West, to which that of the East was destined to be in a few years added, by the defeat and death of Licinius.  Constantine, more clear-sighted and more fortunate than any of his predecessors, had understood his era, and opened his eyes to the new light which was rising upon the world.  Far from persecuting the Christians, as Diocletian and Galerius had done, he had given them protection, countenance,