CHAP.

$7. Rome's Constitutional System.

after a serious and sustained argument in which anyone was permitted to take part. It was a great achievement; but it carried with it its own shadow. If in the Persian monarchy there was no people worthy of the name, in Athens there was no government worthy of the name, no organised institutions which could sufficiently do for the people what Pericles did for them in his lifetime, and which could save them from the alternate rashness and inertness which proved their ruin. If, as a state, Athens was subject to dangers the very opposite to those under which Persia succumbed, her faults as a conqueror were precisely the same as those of Persia. When she converted the leadership of allied states into an imperial sway, she offered them, just as Persia had offered, protection against foreign attack and the cessation of neighbourly wars. She demanded from them, as Persia had demanded, tribute and fidelity. She did not admit them into fellowship with herself or merge her separate existence in that of a mightier whole.

The first commonwealth able to solve the problems which Athens and Persia in their several ways had failed to solve was that of Rome. Whilst she was still but a petty community, she had secured the existence of a body of magistrates with large and almost excessive powers. These magistrates, proceeding as they did from annual elections by the whole body of people, were not likely to entertain projects antagonistic to the desires of those by whom they were chosen, whilst their action was steadied and controlled by the moral and, to some extent, the legal superiority of the senate, a body composed of men who had held office in former years, and whose position was therefore the best guarantee for their practical experience and their wise moderation. The Roman state, unlike as it was to the constitutional states of modern Europe, afforded nevertheless the most

complete instance of constitutional government which the world had yet seen. The object of such a government is to secure as far as possible the carrying out of the general wishes of the governed, after they have passed through the minds of men of superior intelligence and knowledge of affairs. It aims, on the one hand, at placing a check upon the immediate passions and desires of the moment, and on the other hand, at restraining those who are set to guide, from satisfying their own passions and desires in opposition to the distinct wish of the community at large. In some sort indeed this description may suit every government which ever existed There are natural forces in every society which place power in the hands of those who are qualified to lead within the limits prescribed by the general feeling. All that any constitutional system can profess to do is to give regularity to the working of natural laws, to facilitate their action and to avoid the shocks which inevitably follow upon any attempt to set them at naught. In law as in science, man is but the servant and interpreter of nature.

СНАР.

I.

man Pa

It was a great achievement to found a constitutional § 8. Rostate, and to bring, as it were, the brain and heart of the triotism. commonwealth into due relations with each other. But as even the healthy mind in the healthy body avails a man little unless he has sufficient mental power and moral character to bear himself well amidst the trials which new circumstances bring him under, so it is with a commonwealth. The very superiority of Rome's internal constitution gave her external strength, and the conquest of Italy called for new ideas of government under new circumstances. The difficulties of the problem were such as, with our modern ways of thought, it is almost impossible for us even to conceive. To us, familiar as we are with political organisations extending

CHAP.

I.

§ 9. Italy united

under

Rome.

over enormous territories, it is a mere matter of practical convenience, whether a state extend over a few thousand square miles, or over a few hundred thousand. The ancient city communities limited their patriotism to their own fortified home. There were the temples of their Gods, the memories made beautiful by the deeds of their ancestors, and whatever scenes of happiness, or of tender regret their own lives had brought to them. There, too, was the centre of political action, the market place, where the freemen met to acclaim the laws or to choose the magistrates by whom those laws were to be executed, and the senate house where the fathers of the state met to consult how dangers at home and abroad might best be met. The love of country in such a community was as ardent and exclusive as it was narrow, and the dweller in a neighbouring city was regarded not merely as a stranger, but as an implacable foe. The word hostis, by which the Romans designated an enemy, originally meant no more than a foreigner.

It was to the credit of Rome that in her earlier days she had shown herself superior to this feeling of antagonism. She had striven, and conquered; she had spread slaughter and desolation around; but in the end she had offered the right hand of fellowship to those whom she had defeated and oppressed. Plebeian and patrician after a time were amalgamated together, and subsequently the dwellers in the Latin towns were admitted to a citizenship as complete as that of the man whose ancestors had been consuls at the first establishment of the republic. But even in Rome there seemed to come a limit to her transcendent assimilative power. She had been able to understand that a man could be a citizen of Rome who lived at Tusculum or Ardea. She could not understand that a man could be a citizen of Rome who lived too far off to join personally in the vote in the

Roman Forum. She had overcome the moral difficulty, she recoiled before the physical difficulty. The notion of representative arrangements, by which the conquered populations from the Rubicon to the Straits of Messina might appear at Rome by deputy, as they do at this day, never occurred to any Roman, and it is probable that if such an idea had been suggested to him, he would have recoiled from it as from an innovation too daring to be worthy of consideration. Nevertheless, though Rome did not do what a modern state, under similar circumstances, would inevitably have done, she did what no state had ever done before her. She took care indeed, by covering Italy with military posts under the form of colonies, and by joining them by a network of military roads, to make insurrection difficult. But she understood that strength cannot be gained by mere repression. She definitely renounced the idea of wringing money from her Italian subjects. No emissaries went forth from her gates, like the tribute-collecting ships from the port of Athens, to impress upon the Etruscans and the Lucanians the feeling of subjection. All that she asked from them was fellowship in arms, in victory, and in spoil. She called them her allies, and she treated them with the dignified consideration which won their respect and attachment. By their help she rose victorious from the great struggle with Carthage.

Then came the evil days of Rome's too easy victory. The whole Eastern world, Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt fell into her hands. The Mediterranean coast of Africa was subdued. Spain and Gaul were borne down by the overwhelming force of a disciplined attack. At a later time Southern Germany and Southern Britain were added to her territory. Long before the process was accomplished, the old Roman virtues seemed to have passed away for ever. Magi

CHAP.

1.

§ II. The Empire and the Roman Law.

strates went forth to plunder, not to govern. The voters at home chose magistrates who would offer them the highest bribes. The difficulty which had stared the Romans in the face after the conquest of Italy came back upon them in a more bewildering form. The political community consisted of a few hundred thousand demoralised men, living within an easy distance of the Roman Forum. The real community was scattered over every country in Europe, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the mouths of the Rhine to the wastes of the Sahara. In the face of such a population as this the privileges of the Roman voter were as unimportant as the rights of an elector of Shoreham or Truro are to the cultivators of British India. The conquered nations could not possibly come in person to vote at Rome, and even if the idea of representative government had occurred to any one, the first requisite of that form of government, identity of interest and feeling, was entirely wanting. The polished scheming Greek, the effeminate Asiatic, the rude Spaniard and Gaul could not be brought by any constitutional arrangements to co-operate in the work of government. The utmost for which they could hope was the substitution of the rule of a man for the rule of the populace of a single city, or for that of the wealthy tyrants who were able to secure the goodwill of that populace by the most nefarious

means.

The establishment of the Empire gave the provinces all that they could hope to have. In the emperors, the old assimilating genius of Rome was quickened into life once more. The very fact that they had risen to power in antagonism with the special society of the city of Rome, led them to consult the interests of the more extensive community. For a time the want of a constitutional limitation upon their powers was not felt in the exist