Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

The different stages of the battle between plebeians and patricians, or, as we term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved themselves by a social necessity from time to time, belong to the special history of Rome, not to the general philosophy of history with which we are here concerned. The seed of democracy sown at the Sacred Mount went on from one stage of expansion to another, breaking down every barrier of hereditary privilege between the mass of the people and the old aristocracy, till it ended in the Lex Hortensia, passed B.C. 288, which gave to all ordinances passed by the Comitia Tributa—that is, the people assembled in local tribes and voting independently of all aristocratic check or co-operation—the full validity of law. And in this progress of equalisation between class and class in a community, the Muse of history sees only a special illustration of a general law that every aristocracy contending for the maintenance of exclusive privilege against natural right fights a losing battle. But the necessity of the adjustment of the opposing claims of a conservative and a progressive body in the State is a very different thing from the fashion in which the adjustment may be made, and from the consequences that may grow out of the adjustment. Here there is room for any amount of wisdom, and unfortunately also for a large amount of blundering. No man can say that the Roman constitution as it stood, after the plebeians had broken through all aristocratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted machine, or that it afforded any strong guarantee against that degeneracy into licence towards which all unreined democracies naturally tend. But one thing certainly was achieved. Out of the plebeian and patrician elements of the body social, no longer arrayed in hostile attitude, but fronting one another with equal rights before the law, and adjusting their forces in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, there was formed a great political corporation, deliberative and administrative, which for independence, dignity, patriotism, and sagacity, used its authority in such a masterly style and to such world-wide issues that it has earned from Mommsen the complimentary acknowledgment of having been “the first political corporation of all times.”11 This corporation was the Roman Senate, which ruled the policy of Rome for a period of 200 years, from the passing of the Hortensian Law through a long period of African and Asiatic wars down to the civil war of Sulla and Marius, 88 B.C.—a body of which we may perhaps best easily understand the composition and the virtue if we imagine the best elements of our House of Commons and the best elements of the House of Lords merged in one Supreme Assembly of practical wisdom, to the exclusion at once of the feverish factiousness and multitudinous babble of the one assembly, and the brainless obstructiveness and incurable blindness of hereditary class interests in the other. But there was something else in the mixed constitution of Rome besides the tried wisdom and the great practical weight of the Senate. What was that? There was, in the first place, the evil of an elective kingship—for the Consul was really an annual king under a different name, as the President of the United States is a quadriennial king, with greatly more power while his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great Britain; and this implied an annual fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of a germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance under the strong stimulant of the love of power. Then, as in the natural growth of society, a new aristocracy grew up, formed by the addition of the wealthy plebeian families to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a new and numerous plebeian body, practically though not legally excluded from the privilege of the optimates, the old antagonism of patrician and plebeian would revive, and the question arose, What machinery had the legislation of the previous centuries provided to prevent a collision and a rupture between the antagonistic tendencies of the democratic and oligarchic elements in the State? The answer is, None. The authority of the Senate, great as it was both morally and numerically, was antagonised by the co-equal legislative authority of the Comitia Tributa—an assembly as open to any agitator for factious or revolutionary purposes as a meeting of a London mob in Hyde Park, and composed of elements of the most motley and loose description, ready at any moment to give the solemn sanction of a national ordinance to any act of hasty violence or calculated party move which might flatter the vanity or feed the craving of the masses. But this was not all. The tribunate, originally appointed simply for the protection of the commonalty against the rude exercise of patrician power, had now grown to such formidable dimensions that the popular tribune of the day might become the most powerful man in the State, and only require re-election to constitute him into a king whose decrees the consuls and the senators must humiliate themselves to register. Here was a machinery cunningly, one might think, constructed for the purpose of working out its own disruption, even supposing both the popular and aristocratic elements had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high sense of honour, the proud inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils of conquest; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome; lords of the soil, not fathers of the people; banded together for the narrow interests of their own order rather than for the general well-being of the community. The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the mass of the original popular assemblies had been composed, had partly dwindled away under maladministration of the public lands, and partly were mixed up with motley groups of citizens of no fixed residence, and of a town rabble who could be induced to vote for anything by any man who knew to win their favour by a large distribution of Sicilian corn or the exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows; in a word, the populus had become a plebsy or, in our language, the people a populace. Furthermore, let it be noted that this people or populace, tied down to meet only in Rome, as the high seat of Government, was called upon to deal with the administration of countries as far apart and as diverse in character as Madrid and Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from London. Think of a mob of London artisans, on the motion of a Henry George, or even a rational Radical like Mr. Chamberlain, drummed together to pass laws on landed property and taxation through all that vast domain! But so it was; and most unfortunately also the original fathers of the agitation which, at the time of the Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the world into two hostile factions, stabbing one another in the back and cutting one another’s throats, and plotting and counter-plotting in every conceivable style of baseness, after the fashion which is now being exemplified before us in Ireland,—the authors of this agitation were not the demagogues, but the aristocracy; as indeed in all cases of general discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, the parties who are accused of stirring class against class are not the agitators who appear on the scene, but the maladministrators who made their appearance necessary. Man is an animal naturally inclined to obey and to take things quietly; insurrection is too expensive an affair to be indulged in by way of recreation; and there is no truth in the philosophy of history more certain than that whenever the multitude of the ruled rebel against their rulers, the original fault—I do not say the whole blame, for as things go on from bad to worse there may be blame and blunders on both sides—but the original fault and germinative cause of discontent and revolt unquestionably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be said about Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, there can be no doubt that in the case of Rome the original cause of the democratising of the old constitution and the over-riding of senatorial authority by tribunician ordinances was the senators themselves, who, in direct contravention of the public law of the State, with that greed for more land which is the besetting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered themselves, after the fashion of colonial squatters, on the public lands, and refused to surrender them to the State till compelled by the cry of popular right against might, raised by such patriotic and self-sacrificing agitators as the Gracchi—patriotic men who attained their object at last by the only means in their power, but means so drastic that, like doctor’s drugs, they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, and paid for the partial healing of an incurable disease by destroying for ever the balance of the constitution, and inaugurating with their own martyr blood one of the most woeful epochs in human history—an epoch varied by periodical assassinations and consummated by wholesale butcheries.