Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

So much for Athens. Let us now see what lessons are to be learned from Rome. And here, on the threshold, it is quite plain that the abolition of kingship goes in the first place to strengthen the aristocracy, on whom as a body the supreme functions exercised by the monarch naturally devolve. The highly aristocratic type of the early Roman republic, unlimited from above by any superior power, and with only a slight occasional check from a plebeian citizenship in the tender bud, is universally admitted. Plainly enough also it stands written on the face of the early history of the Commonwealth that the administration of the aristocracy was marked in no ordinary degree by all that exclusiveness, insolence, selfishness, and rapacity, which are the besetting sins of an order of men cradled in hereditary conceit, and eating the bread not of labour, but of privilege, “das unverbesserliche Junkerthum,” as Mommsen calls them. To such an extent did they abuse the natural vantage ground of their social position that, while the great body of the substantial yeomanry, who shed their blood in a constant succession of petty wars for the safety of the State, were stinted of their natural reward and degraded from their rightful position, the insolent monopolisers of all dignities and privileges did not blush to take from the people their natural heritage in the public land, and, for the enlargement of their own order, to deprive the State of its stoutest citizens, and the army of its most effective soldiers. The irritation produced by this insolent and anti-social procedure of the old Roman landlords, by the law of reaction common to all forces, produced as its natural consequence a revolt; for, as it has been truly said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less true is it in all history that the insolence of the aristocracy is the cradle of the democracy. That happened accordingly in ancient Rome which Sismondi prophesied might happen in modern Scotland: “If the mighty thanes who rule in those trans-Grampian regions begin to think that they can do without the people, the people may begin to think they can do without them.”10 So at least the Roman plebs thought when, in the year of the city 259, they marched in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the banks of the Anio, and refused to return to the city till their just claims had been conceded and their wrongs redressed. Their wrongs were redressed: conferences, concessions, and compromises, in a hurried and blundering sort of way, were made; tribunes of the plebs were appointed, with the absolute power of stopping the whole machinery of the State with a single negation; and thus was sown the seed of a democracy destined to grow into monstrous proportions, and ripen into the bloody blossom of a military despotism by the hands of the very class of persons who were chiefly interested in preventing it.