This suggests that Augustine had modest hopes about what public officials can accomplish and so he has modest hopes for politics. The suggestion draws some support from his description of earthly peace as a mere compromise. It draws still more from a rhetorical question Augustine poses earlier in City of God. “As far as this mortal life is concerned,” he asks, “which is spent and finished in a few days, what difference does it make under [whose] rule a man lives, who is so soon to die?