be a candidate for it unless you were already of the “order.”  If, when you are a senator, there is anything serious against you, or if you become impoverished, your name may be expunged from the list.  Otherwise you remain a senator all your life, and your son in turn is of the “order,” and may pass into the Senate by the same process.  If you were a popular or highly deserving person, and from any accident had lost your property, the emperor would frequently make up the deficiency, or your brother senators would subscribe the necessary amount.

But an emperor could meanwhile raise to the “order” anyone he chose.  He could give him standing, and so make him eligible as a candidate for that public office which was preliminary to entering the actual Senate.  Moreover, when it came to the elections to this office which served as the indispensable stepping-stone to the Senate-House, the vacancies were limited in number, and the emperor had the right of either nominating or recommending the candidates whom he preferred.  Needless to say, those candidates were invariably elected.  It was, of course, monstrous arrogance for Caligula to boast that he could make his horse a consul if he chose, but the taunt contained a measure of truth.

Let us then put the case thus.  Imagine that a modern senate is recruited from persons whose names are in the Peerage and Baronetage, and that, before any scion of such a family can enter the Senate itself, he must go through some sort of under-secretaryship, to which he must first be elected.

But next imagine that the sovereign can raise to the rank of “peerage or baronetage” some favoured person whose family does not yet figure in Debrett.  Such a man is then entitled to put his name on the list of candidates for the necessary under-secretaryship, and, when the sovereign reviews that list, he marks the candidate as nominated or recommended by himself.  So he passes into the Senate.

Most emperors did this but sparingly.  They made the Senate an aristocratic and wealthy body, keeping its numbers at somewhere near 600.  We must not be perpetually assuming that the Caesars were either reckless or unscrupulous, because two or three were of that character.  Many of them were remarkably capable and sagacious men.  They recognised the need of ability and high character in their Senate.  They had themselves enough of the old Roman exclusiveness to keep their honours from being made too cheap, and the probability is that under their rule the Senate was quite as honourable and quite as able a body as it was at any time under the republic.