concluded with Carthage, proves that the state had already acquired consideration with distant states. "Setting aside," says our author, "the tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given of the wealth and greatness of Judea under Solomon may convey some idea of the state of Rome under its latter kings. Powerful amongst surrounding nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, with a flourishing agriculture and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence, and to invest himself with a splendour unknown in the earlier times of the monarchy.” But mark the effect upon the external power and internal liberties of the nation, consequent on the violent change in the Government and establishment of the Commonwealth, as portrayed in the authentic pages of this liberal historian. "In the first year of the Commonwealth, the Romans still possessed the dominion enjoyed by their kings; all the cities of the coast of Latium, as we have already seen, were subject to them as far as Terracina. Within twelve years, we cannot certainly say how much sooner, these were all become independent. This is easily intelligible, if we only take into account the loss to Rome of an able and absolute king, the natural weakness of an unsettled government, and the distractions produced by the king's attempts to recover his throne. The Latins may have held, as we are told of the Sabines in this very time, that their dependent alliance with Rome had been concluded with King Tarquinius, and that as he was king no longer, and as his sons had been driven out with him, all covenants between Latium and Rome were become null and void. But it is possible also, if the chronology of the common story of these times can be at all depended on, that the Latin cities owed their independence to the Etruscan conquest of Rome. For that war, which has been given in its poetical version as the war with Porsenua, was really a great outbreak of the Etruscan power upon the nations southward of Etruria, in the very front of whom lay the Romans. In the very next year after the expulsion of the king, according to the common story, and certainly at some time within the period with which we are now concerned, the Etrus cans fell upon Rome. The result of the war is, indeed, as strangely disguised in the poetical story as Charlemagne's invasion of Spain is in the romances. Rome was completely conquered; all the territory which the kings had won on the right bank of the Tiber was now lost. Rome itself was surrendered to the Etruscan conqueror; his sovereignty was fully acknowledged, the Romans gave up their arms, and recovered their city and territory on the condition of renouncing the use of iron, except for implements of agriculture. But this bondage did not last long; the Etruscan power was broken by a great defeat sustained before Aricia; for after the fall of Rome the conquerors attacked Latium; and while besieging Aricia, the united force of the Latin cities, aided by the Greeks of Cumæ, succeeded in destroying their army, and in confining their power to their own side of the Tiber. Still, however, the Romans did not recover their territory on the ber of their tribes, as has been already right bank of that river, and the uumnoticed, was consequently lessened by one third, being reduced from thirty to twenty. "Thus, within a short time after the banishment of the last king, the Romans lost all their territory on the Etruscan side of the Tiber, and all their dominion over Latium. A third people were their immediate neighbours on the north-east, the Sabines. The cities of the Sabines reached, says Varro, from Reale to the distance of half a day's journey from Rome; that is, according to the varying estimate of a day's jour ney, either seventy-five or a hundred stadia, about ten or twelve miles." "It is certain also, that the first enlargement of the Roman territory after its great diminution in the Etruscan war, took place towards the north-east, between the Tiber and the Anio; and here were the lands of the only new tribes that were added to the Roman nation, for the space of more than one hundred and twenty years after the establishment of the Commonwealth." Such was the disastrous effects of the revolution which expelled Tarquinius Superbus, even though originating, if we may believe the story of Lucretia, in a heinous crime on his part, on the external power and territorial possessions of Rome. Let us next inquire whether the social condition of the people was improved by the change, and the plebeians reaped those fruits from the violent change of the Government which they were doubtless led to expect. "The most important part," says Ar nold, "in the history of the first years of the commonwealth is the tracing, if possible, the gradual depression of the commons to that extreme point of misery which led to the institution of the tribuneship. We have seen that immediately after the expulsion of the king, the commons shared in the advantages of the revolution; but within a few years we find them so oppressed and powerless, that their utmost hopes aspired, not to the assertion of political equality with the burghers, but merely to the obtaining protection from personal injuries. "The specific character of their degration is stated to have been this; that there prevailed among them severe distress, amounting in many cases to actual ruin; that to relieve themselves from their poverty, they were in the habit of borrowing money of the burghers; that the distress continuing, they became generally insolvent; and that as the the law of debtor and ereditor was exceedingly severe, they became liable in their persons to the cruelty of the burghers, were treated by them as slaves, confined as such in their workhouses, kept to task work, and often beaten at the discretion of their laskmasters." Various were the miseries to which the commons were reduced in consequence of the revolution, and inexorable the rigour with which the nobles pressed the advantage they had gained by the abolition of the kingly form of government. The civil convulsions and general distress, Dr. Arnold tells us, terminated in the establishment of an exclusive oppressive aristocracy, interrupted occasionally by the legalised despotism of a single individual. "Thus the monarchy was exchanged for an exclusive aristocracy, in which the burghers or patricians possessed the whole dominion of the state. For mixed as was the influcnce in the assembly of the centuries, and although the burghers through their clients exercised no small control over it, still they did not think it safe to intrust it with much power. In the election of consals, the centuries could only choose out of a number of patrician or burgher candidates; and even after this election it remained for the burghers in their great council in the curia to ratify it or to annul it, by conferring upon, or refusing to the persons so elected the 'Imperium;' in other words, that sovereign power which belonged to the consuls as the successors of the kings, and which, except so far as it was limited within the walls of the city, and a circle of one mile without them, by the right of ap peal, was absolute over life and death. As for any legislative power, in this period of the commonwealth, the consuls were their own law. No doubt the burghers had their customs, which in all great points the consuls would duly observe, because, otherwise on the expiration of their office they would be liable to arraignment before the curiæ, and to such punishment as that sovereign assembly might please to inflict; but the the commons had no such security, and the uncertainty of the consul's judgments was the particular grievance which afterwards led to the formation of the code of the twelve tables. "We are told however, that within ten years of the first institution of the consuls, the burghers found it necessary to create a single magistrate with powers still more absolute, who was to exercise the full sovereignty of a king, and even without that single check to which the kings of Rome had been subjected. The Master of the people, that is, of the burghers, or as he was otherwise calied, the Dictator, was appointed, it is true, for six months only; and therefore liable, like the consuls, to be arraigned, after the expiration of his office, for any acts of tyranny which he might have committed during the continuance. But whilst he retained his office, he was absolute without the walls of the city as the consuls were within them; neither commoners nor burghers had any right of appeal from his sentence, although the latter had enjoyed this protection in the times of the monarchy." At length the misery of the people, flowing from the revolution, became so excessive that they could endure it no longer, and they took the resolution to separate altogether from their oppressors, and retire to the sacred hill to found a new Commonwealth. "Fifteen years after the expulsion of Tarquinius, the commons, driven to despair by their distress, and exposed without protection to the capricious cruelty of the burghers, resolved to endure their degraded state no longer.the particulars of this second revolution are as uncertain as those of the overthrow of the monarchy; but thus much is certain, and is remarkable, that the commons sought safety, not victory; they desired to escape from Rome, not to govern it. It may be true that the commons who were left in Rome gathered together on the Aventine, the quarter appropriated to their order, and occupied the hill as a fortress; but it is universally agreed that the most efficient part of their body, who were at that time in the field as soldiers, deserted their generals, and marched off to a hill beyond the Anio; that is, to a spot beyond the limits of the Ager Romanus, the proper territory of the burgher, but signed to one of the newly created tribes of the commons, the Crustuminian. Here they established themselves, and here they proposed to found a new city of their own to which they would have gathered their families, and the rest of their order who were left behind in Rome, and have given up their old city ty its original possessors, the burghers and their clients. But the burghers were as unwilling to lose the services of the commons, as the Egyptians in the like case to let the Israelites go, and they endeavoured by every means to persuade then to return. To show how little the commons thought of gaining political power, we have only to notice their demands. They required a general cancelling of the obligations insolvent debtors, and the release of all those, whose persons, in default of payment had been assigned over to the power of their creditors; and further they insisted on having two of their own body acknowledged by the burghers as their protectors; and to make this protection effectual, the persons of those who afforded it were to be as inviolable as those of the heralds, the sacred messengers of the gods; whosoever harmed them was to be held accursed, and might be slain by any one with impunity. To these terms the burghers agreed; a solemn treaty was concluded between them and the commons, as between two distinct nations; and the burghers swore for themselves, and for their prosperity, that they would hold inviolable the persons of two officers, to be chosen by the centuries on the field of Mars, whose business it should be to extend full protection to any commoner against a sentence of the consul; that is to say, who might rescue any debtor from the power of his creditor, if they conceived it to be capriciously or cruelly exerted. The two officers thus chosen retained the name which the chief officers of the commons had borne before, they were called Tribuni, or tribe masters; but instead of being merely the officers of one particular tribe, and exercising an authority only over the members of their own order, they were named tribunes of the commons at large, and their power, as protectors in stopping any exercise of oppression towards their own body, extended over the burghers, and was by them solemnly acknowledged. The number of the tribunes was probably suggested by that of the consuls; there within the district which had been as were to be two chief officers of the commons as there were of the burghers." Thus, all that the Roman populace gained by the revolution which overturned the kingly power, was such a diminution of territory and external importance as it required them more than one hundred and fifty years to recover, and such an oppressive form of aristocratic Government as compelled them to take refuge under a dictator, and led to such a degree of misery, as eighteen years after the convulsion, made them ready to quit their country and homes, and become exiles from their native land! At the close of the third century of Rome, and fifty years after the expulsion of the Tarquins, Arnold gives the following picture of the external condition of the Republic: "At the close of the third century of Rome, the warfare which the Romans had to maintain against the Opican nations was generally defensive; that the Equians and Volscians had advanced from the line of the Appennines and established themselves on the Alban hills, in the he art of Latium; that of the thirty Latin states which had formed the league with Rome in the year 261, thir teen Ac were now either destroyed, or that on the Alban hills themselves Tuswere in the possession of the Opicans; culum alone remained independent; and that there was no other friendly city to obstruct the irruptions of the enemy into the territory of Rome. cordingly, that territory was plundered year after year, and whatever defeats the plunderers may at times have sustained, yet they were never deterred from renewing a contest which they found in the main profitable and glorious. So greatly had the power and dominion of Rome fallen since the overthrow of the monarchy." It was by slow degrees, and in a long series of contests, continued without intermission for two hundred years, that the commons recovered the liberties they had lost from the consequences of this triumph in the first convulsion; so true it is, in all ages, that the people are not only never permanent gainers, but in the end the greatest had been most completely victorious. losers by the revolution in which they The next great social convulsion of Rome was that consequent on the overthrow of the Decemvirs. The success of that revolution operated in the end grievously to the prejudice of the commons, and retarded, by half a century, the advance of real freedom. Every one knows that the Decemvirs were elected to re-model the laws of the Commonwealth; that they shamefully abused their trust, and constituted themselves tyrants without control; and that they were at last overthrown by the general and uncontrollable indignation excited by the injustice of Appius to the daughter of Virginius. A juster cause for resistance, a fairer ground for the overthrow of existing authority, could not be imagined; it was accordingly successful, and the immediate effect of the popular triumph was a very great accession of political power to the commons. Arnold tells us― "The revolution did not stop here. Other and deeper changes were effected; but they lasted so short a time, that their memory has almost vanished out of the records of history. The assembly of the tribes had been put on a level with that of the centuries, and the same principle was followed out in the equal division of all the magistracies of the state between the patricians and the commons. Twosupreme magistrates, invested with the highest judicial power, and discharging also those important duties which were afterwards performed by the censors, were to be chosen every year, one from the patricians, and the other from the commons. Ten tribunes of the soldiers, or decemviri, chosen five from the patricians and five from the commons, were to command the armies in war, and to watch over the rights of the patricians; while ten tribanes of the commons, also chosen in equal proportions from both orders, were to watch over the liberties of the commons. And as patricians were thus admitted to the old tribuneship, so the assemblies of the tribes were henceforth, like those of the centuries, to be held under the sanctions of augury, and nothing could be determined in them if the auspices were unfavourable. Thus the two orders were to be made fully equal to one another; but at the same time they were to be kept perpetually distinct; for at this very moment the whole twelve tables of the laws of the decemvirs received the solemn sanction of the people, although, as we have seen, there was a law in one of the last tables which declared the marriage of patrician with a plebian to be unlawful. "There being thus an end of all exclusive magistracies, whether patrician or plebian; and all magistrates being now recognised as acting in the name of the whole people, the persons of all were to be regarded as equally sacred. VOL. XLIV. 14 Thus the consul Horatius proposed and carried a law which declared that, whoever harmed any tribune of the commons, any ædile, any judge or any decevir, should be outlawed and accursed; that any man might slay him, and cated to the temple of Ceres. Another that all his p operty should be cofislaw was passed by M. Duilius, one of the tribunes, carrying the penalties of the Valerian law to a greater height against any magistrate who should either neglect to have new magistrates appointed at the end of the year, or who should create them without giving the right of appeal from their sentence. visions was to be burned alive as a Whosoever violated either of those propublic enemy. "Finally, in order to prevent the dewith by the patricians, Horatius and crees of the senate from being tampered Valerius began the practice of having them carried to the temple of Ceres on the Aventine, and there laid up under the care of the ediles of the commons. ducted chiefly, as far as appears, by the "This complete revolution was conlatter we should wish to have some furtwo consuls, and by M. Duilius. Of the ther knowledge; it is an unsatisfactory history, in which we can only judge of stead of being enabled to form some esthe man from his public measures, intimate of the merit of his measures from our acquaintance with the chadoubt that the new constitution attempt racter of the man. But there is no ed to obtain objects for which the time rather as the triumph of a party, than was not yet come, which were regarded as called for by the wants and feelings of the nation; and therefore the Roman constitution of 306 was as short-lived as Simon de Montfort's provisions of Oxford, or as some of the strongest meas ures of the Long Parliament. An ad vantage pursued too far in politics, as well as in war, is apt to end in a repulse." After a continued struggle of seven years, however, this democratic constitution yielded to the reaction in favour of the old institutions of the state, and the experienced evils of the new, and another constitution was the result of the struggle which restored matters to the same situation in which they had been before the overthrow of a the Decemvirs; with the addition of a most important officer-the Censor, endowed with almost despotic power to the patrician faction. This decided reaction is thus described, and the inferences deducible from it fairly stated by Dr. Arnold. "In the following year we meet for the first time with the name of a new patrician magistracy, the censorship; and Niebuhr saw clearly that the creation of this office was connected with the appointment of tribunes of the soldiers; and that both belong to what may be called the constitution of the year 312. "This constitution recognized two points; a sort of continuation of the principle of the decemvirate, inasmuch as the supreme government was again, to speak in modern language, put in commission, and the kingly powers, formerly united in the consuls or prætors, were now to be divided between the censors and tribunes of the soldiers; and secondly, the eligibility of the commons to share in some of the powers thus divided. But the partition, even in theory, was far from equal: the two censors, who were to hold their office for five years, were not only chosen from the patricians, but, as Niebuhr thinks, by them, that is, by the assembly of the curiæ: the two quæstors, who judged in cases of blood, were also chosen from the patricians, although by the centuries. Thus the civil power of the old prætors was in its most important points still exercised exclusively by the patricians; and even their military power, which was professedly to be open to both orders, was not transmitted to the tribunes of the soldiers, without some diminution of its majesty. The new tribuneship was not an exact image of the kingly sovereignty; it was not a curule office, and therefore no tribune ever enjoyed the honour of a triumph, in which the conquering general, ascending to the Capitol to sacrifice to the guardian gods of Rome, was wont to be arrayed in all the insignia of royalty. "But even the small share of power thus granted in theory to the commons, was in practice withheld from them. Whether from the influence of the patricians in the centuries, or by religious pretences urged by the augurs, or by the enormous and arbitrary power of refusing votes which the officer presiding at the comitia was wont to exercise, the college of the tribunes was for many years filled by the patricians alone. And while the censorship was to be a fixed institution, the tribunes of the soldiers were to be replaced whenever it might appear needful by the two consuls; and to the consulship no plebeian was so much as legally eligible. Thus the victory of the aristocracy may seem to have been complete, and we may wonder how the commons, after having carried so triumphantly the law of Canuleuis, should have allowed the political rights asserted for them by his colleagues, to have been so partially conceded in theory, and in practice to be so totally withheld. "The explanation is simple, and it is one of the most valuable lessons of history. The commons obtained those reforms which they desired, and they desired such only as their state was ripe for. They had withdrawn in times past to the Sacred Hill, but it was to escape from intolerable personal op pression; they had recently occupied the Aventine in arms, but it was to get rid of a tyranny which endangered the honour of their wives and daughters, and to recover the protection of their tribunes; they had more lately still retired to the Janiculum, but it was to remove an insulting distinction which embittered the relations of private life, and imposed on their grandchildren, in many instances, the inconveniences, if not the reproach of illegitimacy. These were all objects of universal and personal interest; and these the commons were resolved not to relinquish. But the possible admission of a few distinguished members of their body to the highest offices of state concerned the mass of the commons but little. They had their own tribunes for their personal protection; but curule magistracies, and the government of the commonwealth, seemed to belong to the patricians, or at least might be left in their hands without any great sacrifice. So it is that all things come best in their season; that political power is then most happily exercised by a people, when it has not been given to them prematurely, that is, before, in the natural progress of things, they feel the want of it. Security for person and property enables a nation to grow without interruption; in contending for this a people's sense of law and right is wholesomely exercised; meantime national prosperity increases, and brings with it an increase of intelligence, till other and more necessary wants being satisfied, men awaken to the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind, the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government. The Roman commons abandoned the highest magistracies to the patricians for a period of many years; but they continued to increase in prosperity and in influence; and what the fathers had wisely yielded, their sons in the fulness of time acquired. So the English House of Commons, in the reign of Eiward III., declined to interfere in questions of peace and war, as being too high for them to compass; but they would not allow the crown to take their money without their own consent; and so the nation grew, |