nold," in the history of the first years of the commonwealth is the tracing, if pos sible, 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 com- mons 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 degradation 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 dis. tress continuing, they became generally insolvent; and that as the law of debtor and creditor 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 taskwork, and often beaten at the discretion of their taskmasters."

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 influence 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 elec tion of consuls, 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 euria 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

appeal, was absolute over life und 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 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 called, the Dictator, was appointed, it is true, for six months only; and therefore liable, like the consuls, to he arraigned, after the expiration of his office, for any acts of tyranny which he might have committed during its continuance. But whilst he retained his office he was as 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 rovolution 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 burghers, but within the district which had been assigned 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 to 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 them 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 of 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 acknow. ledged 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 posterity, 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 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 Apennines and established themselves on the Alban hills, in the heart of Latium; that of the thirty Latin states which had formed the league with Rome in the year 261, thirteen were now either destroyed, or were in the possession of the Opicans; that on the Alban hills themselves Tusculum alone remained independent; and that there was no other friendly city to obstruct the irruptions of the enemy into the territory of Rome. Accordingly, 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 this first convulsion; so true it is, in all ages, that the people are not only never permanent gainers, but in the end the greatest losers by the revolution in which they had been most completely victorious.

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. 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

A

"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. Two supreme 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 tribunes 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 a patrician with a plebeian to be unlawful.

"There being thus an end of all exclusive magistracies, whether patrician or plebeian; 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. 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 decemvir, should be outlawed and accursed; that any man might slay him, and that all his property should be confiscated to the temple of Ceres. Another law 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 apshould create them without giving the right pointed at the end of the year, or who of appeal from their sentence. Whosoever violated either of these provisions was to be burned alive as a public enemy.

"Finally, in order to prevent the decrees of the senate from being tampered with by the patricians, Horatius and 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 ædiles of the commons.

"This complete revolution was conducted chiefly, as far as appears, by the two consuls, and by M. Duilius. Of the latter we should wish to have some further knowledge; it is an unsatisfactory history, in which we can only judge of the man from his public measures, instead of being enabled to form some estimate of the merit of his measures from our acquaintance with the character of the man. But there is no doubt that the new constitution attempted to obtain objects for which the time was not yet come, which were regarded rather as the triumph of a party, than 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 measures of the Long Parliament. An advantage 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 the Decemvirs; with the addition of a most important officer-the Censor, endowed with almost despotic powerto 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 patrieian 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 recognised 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 curiae; 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 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 earried so triumphantly the law of Canuleius, 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 oppression; 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 Edward 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, and the influence of the House of Commons grew along with it, till that house has become the great and predominant power in the British constitution.

"If this view be correct, Trebonius judged far more wisely than M. Duilius;