of the arrangement—­in itself so judicious—­for a longer tenure of such offices,(36) very clearly evince the anxiety felt by the more far-seeing of the Roman statesmen as to the fruits of the seed thus sown.  But diagnosis is not cure.  The internal government of the nobility continued to follow the direction once given to it; and the decay of the administration and of the financial system—­paving the way for future revolutions and usurpations—­steadily pursued its course, if not unnoticed, yet unchecked.

The Opposition

If the new nobility was less sharply defined than the old aristocracy of the clans, and if the encroachment on the other burgesses as respected the joint enjoyment of political rights was in the one case -de jure-, in the other only -de facto-, the second form of inferiority was for that very reason worse to bear and worse to throw off than the first.  Attempts to throw it off were, as a matter of course, not wanting.  The opposition rested on the support of the public assembly, as the nobility did on the senate:  in order to understand the opposition, we must first describe the Roman burgess-body during this period as regards its spirit and its position in the commonwealth.

Character of the Roman Burgess-Body

Whatever could be demanded of an assembly of burgesses like the Roman, which was not the moving spring, but the firm foundation, of the whole machinery—­a sure perception of the common good, a sagacious deference towards the right leader, a steadfast spirit in prosperous and evil days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual for the general welfare and the comfort of the present for the advantage of the future—­all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all censure is lost in reverent admiration.  Even now good sense and discretion still thoroughly predominated.  The whole conduct of the burgesses with reference to the government as well as to the opposition shows quite clearly that the same mighty patriotism before which even the genius of Hannibal had to quit the field prevailed also in the Roman comitia.  No doubt they often erred; but their errors originated not in the mischievous impulses of a rabble, but in the narrow views of burgesses and farmers.  The machinery, however, by means of which the burgesses intervened in the course of public affairs became certainly more and more unwieldy, and the circumstances in which they were placed through their own great deeds far outgrew their power to deal with them.  We have already stated, that in the course of this epoch most of the former communities of passive burgesses, as well as a considerable number of newly established colonies, received the full Roman franchise.(37) At the close of this period the Roman burgess-body, in a tolerably compact mass, filled Latium in its widest sense, Sabina, and a part of Campania, so that it reached on the west coast northward to