accounts have been left us, afford striking proof of the former part of this observation.

What was, for instance, the consequence of that great revolution by which the kings were driven from Rome, and in which the senate and patricians acted as the advisers and leaders of the people? The consequence was, as we find in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Livy, that the senators immediately assumed all those powers lately so much complained of by themselves, which the kings had exercised. The execution of their future decrees was intrusted to two magistrates, taken from their own body, and entirely dependent on them, whom they called consuls, and who were made to bear about them all the ensigns of power which had formerly attended the kings. Only, care was taken that the axes and fasces, the symbols of the power of life and death over the citizens, which the senate now claimed to itself, should not be carried before both consuls at once, but only before one at a time; for fear, says Livy, of doubling the terror of the people.*

Nor was this all: the senators drew over to their party those men who had the most interest at that time among the people, and admitted them as members into their own body; which, indeed, was a precaution they could not prudently avoid taking. But the interests of the great men in the republic being thus provided for, the revolution ended. The new senators, as well as the old, took care not to lessen, by making provisions for the liberty of the people, a power which was now become their own. Nay, they presently stretched this power beyond its former tone; and the punishments which the consul inflicted, in a military manner, on a number of those who still adhered to the former mode of government, and even upon his own children, taught the people what they had to expect for the future, if they presumed to oppose the power of those whom they had thus unwarily made their masters.

* "Omnia jura (regum), omnia insignia, primi consules tenuere; id modò cautum est, ne, ambo fasces haberent, duplicatus terror videre

tur."-Tit. Liv. lib. ii. § 1.

These new senators were called conscripti: hence the name of patres conscripti, afterwards indiscriminately given to the whole senate.-Tit. Liv. ibid.

Among the oppressive laws or usages which the senate, after the expulsion of the kings, had permitted to continue, what were most complained of by the people were those by which such citizens as could not pay their debts, with the interest (which at Rome was enormous), at the appointed time, became slaves to their creditors, and were delivered over to them, bound with cords: hence the word nexi, by which slaves of that kind were denominated. The cruelties exercised by creditors on those unfortunate men, whom the private calamities, caused by the frequent wars in which Rome was engaged, rendered very numerous, at last roused the body of the people: they abandoned both the city and their inhuman fellow-citizens, and retreated to the other side of the river Anio.

But this second revolution, like the former, only procured the advancement of particular persons. A new office was created, called the tribuneship. Those whom the people had placed at their head when they left the city, were raised to it. Their duty, it was agreed, was, for the future, to protect the citizens; and they were invested with a certain number of prerogatives for that purpose. This institution, it must however be confessed, would have, in the issue, proved very beneficial to the people, at least for a long course of time, if certain precautions had been taken with respect to it, which would have much lessened the future personal importance of the new tribunes:* but these precautions the latter did not think proper to suggest; and in regard to those abuses themselves, which had at first given rise to the complaints of the people, no farther mention was made of them.+

As the senate and patricians, in the early ages of the commonwealth, kept themselves closely united, the tribunes, for all their personal privileges, were not able, during the first times after their creation, to gain an admittance either to the consulship, or into the senate, and thereby to

* Their number, which was only ten, ought to have been much greater; and they never ought to have accepted the power left to each of them, of stopping, by his single opposition, the proceedings of all the rest.

+ Many other seditions were afterwards raised upon the same account.

separate their condition any farther from that of the people. This situation of theirs, in which it was to be wished they might always have been kept, produced at first excellent effects, and caused their conduct to answer, in a great measure, the expectation of the people. The tribunes complained loudly of the exorbitancy of the powers possessed by the senate and consuls: and here we must observe that the powers exercised by the latter over the lives of the citizens had never been yet subjected (which will probably surprise the reader) to any known laws, though sixty years had already elapsed since the expulsion of the kings. The tribunes therefore insisted that laws should be made in that respect, which the consuls should thenceforward be bound to follow, and that they should no longer be left, in the exercise of their power over the lives of the citizens, to their own caprice and wantonness.*

Equitable as these demands were, the senate and patricians opposed them with great warmth, and, either by naming dictators, or calling in the assistance of the priests, or other means, they defeated for nine years together all the endeavours of the tribunes. However, as the latter were at that time in earnest, the senate was at length obliged to comply; and the Lex Terentilla was passed, by which it was enacted, that a general code of laws should be made.

These beginnings seemed to promise great success to the cause of the people. But, unfortunately for them, the senate found means to have it agreed, that the o i tribune should be set aside during the whole time that the code should be framing. They, moreover, obtained that the ten men, called decemvirs, to whom the charge of composing this code was to be given, should be taken from the body of the patricians. The same causes, therefore, produced again the same effects; and the power of the senate and consul was left in the new code, or laws of the Twelve Tables, as undefined as above. As to the laws above mentioned, concerning debtors, which never had ceased to be bitterly complained of by the people, and in regard to which some satisfaction ought, in common justice, to have been given

* "Quod populus in se jus dederit, eo consulem usurum; non ipsos libidinem ac licentiam suam pro lege habituros."-Tit. Liv. lib. iii. § 9.

them, they were confirmed, and a new terror added to them from the manner in which they were expressed.

The true motive of the senate, when they thus trusted the framing of the new laws to a new kind of magistrates, called decemvirs, was, that, by suspending the ancient office of consul, they might have a fair pretence for suspending also the office of tribune, and thereby rid themselves of the people, during the time that the important business of framing the code should be carrying on: they even, in order the better to secure that point, placed the whole power of the republic in the hands of those new magistrates. But the senate and patricians experienced then, in their turn, the danger of intrusting men with an uncontrolled authority. As they themselves had formerly betrayed the trust which the people had placed in them, so did the decemvirs, on this occasion, likewise deceive them. They retained by their own private authority the unlimited power that had been conferred on them, and at last exercised it on the patricians as well as the plebeians. Both parties, therefore, united against them, and the decemvirs were expelled from the city.

The former dignities of the republic were restored, and with them the office of tribune. Those from among the people who had been most instrumental in destroying the power of the decemvirs, were, as it was natural, raised to the tribuneship; and they entered upon their offices with a prodigious degree of popularity. The senate and the patricians were, at the same time, sunk extremely low in consequence of the long tyranny which had just expired; and those two circumstances united, afforded the tribunes but too easy an opportunity of making the present revolution end as the former ones had done, and converting it to the advancement of their own power. They got new personal privileges to be added to those which they already possessed; and moreover procured a law to be enacted, by which it was ordained, that the resolutions taken by the comitia tributa (an assembly in which the tribunes were admitted to propose new laws) should be binding upon the whole commonwealth; -by which they at once raised to themselves an imperium in imperio, and acquired, as Livy expresses it, a most active weapon.*

* Acerrimum telum.

From that time great commotions arose in the republic, which, like all those before them, ended in promoting the power of a few. Proposals for easing the people of their debts, for dividing with some equality amongst the citizens the lands which were taken from the enemy, and for lowering the rate of the interest of money, were frequently made by the tribunes. And indeed all these were excellent regulations to propose but, unfortunately for the people, the proposals of them were only pretences used by the tribunes for promoting schemes of a fatal, though somewhat remote, tendency to public liberty. Their real aims were at the consulship, the prætorship, the priesthood, and other offices of executive power, which they were intended to control, and not to share. To these views they constantly made the cause of the people subservient. I shall relate, among other instances, the manner in which they procured to themselves an admittance to the office of consul.

Having, during several years, seized every opportunity of making speeches to the people on that subject, and even excited seditions in order to overcome the opposition of the senate, they at last availed themselves of the circumstance of an interregnum (a time during which there happened to be no other magistrates in the republic besides themselves), and proposed to the tribes, whom they had assembled, to enact the three following laws:-the first, for settling the rate of interest of money; the second, for ordaining that no citizen should be possessed of more than five hundred acres of land; and the third, for providing that one of the two consuls should be taken from the body of the plebeians. But on this occasion it evidently appeared, says Livy, which of the laws in agitation were most agreeable to the people, and which to those who proposed them; for the tribes accepted the laws concerning the interest of money, and the lands; but as to that concerning the plebeian consulship, they rejected it; and both the former articles would from that moment have been settled, if the tribunes had not declared, that the tribes were called upon, either to accept, or reject, all their three proposals at once.* Great commotions en

* "Ab tribunis, velut per interregnum, concilio plebis habito, apparuit quæ ex promulgatis plebi, quæ latoribus, gratiora essent; nam de fœnore atque agro rogationes jubebant, de plebeio consulatu anti