in the mildest form of slavery, a master occupies towards his slave.  As the patronus was to the libertus, when it became customary to liberate slaves, so in some measure were the Fathers to their retainers, the Clients.  That the community was originally divided into these two sections is known.  What is not known is how, besides this primary division of patres and clientes, there arose a second political class in the State, namely the plebs.  The client as client had no political existence. [Sidenote:  The plebeians.] But as a plebeian he had.  Whether the plebs was formed of clients who had been released from their clientship, just as slaves might be manumitted; or of foreigners, as soldiers, traders, or artisans were admitted into the community; or partly of foreigners and partly of clients, the latter being equalised by the patres with the former in self-defence; and whether as a name it dated from or was antecedent to the so-called Tullian organization is uncertain.  But we know that in one way or other a second political division in the State arose and that the constitution, of which Servius Tullius was the reputed author, made every freeman in Rome a citizen by giving him a vote in the Comitia Centuriata.  Yet though the plebeian was a citizen, and as such acquired ‘commercium,’ or the right to hold and devise property, it was only after a prolonged struggle that he achieved political equality with the patres. [Sidenote:  Gradual acquisition by the plebs of political equality with the patres.] Step by step he wrung from them the rights of intermarriage and of filling offices of state; and the great engine by which this was brought about was the tribunate, the historical importance of which dates from, even though as a plebeian magistracy it may have existed before, the first secession of the plebs in 494 B.C. [Sidenote:  Character of the tribunate.] The tribunate stood towards the freedom of the Roman people in something of the same relation which the press of our time occupies towards modern liberty:  for its existence implied free criticism of the executive, and out of free speech grew free action. [Sidenote:  The Roman government transformed from oligarchy into a plutocracy.]

Side by side with those external events which made Rome mistress first of her neighbours, then, of Italy, and lastly of the world, there went on a succession of internal changes, which first transformed a pure oligarchy into a plutocracy, and secondly overthrew this modified form of oligarchy, and substituted Caesarism.  With the earlier of these changes we are concerned here but little.  The political revolution was over when the social revolution which we have to record began.  But the roots of the social revolution were of deep growth, and were in fact sometimes identical with those of the political revolution. [Sidenote:  Parallel between Roman and English history.] Englishmen can understand such an intermixture the more readily from the analogies, more or less close, which their