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THREE:To make matters worse, the original of this unflattering portrait was rapidly becoming the most powerful man in the State. Increasing specialisation had completely separated the military and political functions which had formerly been discharged by a single eminent individual, and the business of legislation was also becoming a distinct profession. No orator could obtain a hearing in the assembly who had not a technical acquaintance with the subject of deliberation, if it admitted of technical treatment, which was much more frequently the case now than in the preceding generation. As a consequence of this revolution, the ultimate power of supervision and control was passing into the hands of the law courts, where general questions could be discussed in a more popular style, and often from a wider or a more sentimental point of view. They were, in fact, beginning to wield an authority like that exercised until quite lately by the press in modern Europe, only that its action was much more direct and formidable. A vote of the Eccl��sia could only deprive a statesman of office: a vote of the Dicastery might deprive him of civil rights, home, freedom, property, or even life itself. Moreover, with the loss of empire and the decline of public spirit, private interests had come to attract a proportionately larger share of attention; and unobtrusive citi201zens who had formerly escaped from the storms of party passion, now found themselves marked out as a prey by every fluent and dexterous pleader who could find an excuse for dragging them before the courts. Rhetoric was hailed as the supreme art, enabling its possessor to dispense with every other study, and promising young men were encouraged to look on it as the most paying line they could take up. Even those whose civil status or natural timidity precluded them from speaking in public could gain an eminent and envied position by composing speeches for others to deliver. Behind these, again, stood the professed masters of rhetoric, claiming to direct the education and the whole public opinion of the age by their lectures and pamphlets. Philosophy was not excluded from their system of training, but it occupied a strictly subordinate place. Studied in moderation, they looked on it as a bracing mental exercise and a repertory of sounding commonplaces, if not as a solvent for old-fashioned notions of honesty; but a close adherence to the laws of logic or to the principles of morality seemed puerile pedantry to the elegant stylists who made themselves the advocates of every crowned filibuster abroad, while preaching a policy of peace at any price at home.