These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no adequate means of overcoming them.  Unless helped by something supplied from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped.  What was needed was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local self-government.  The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been applied.  It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union, but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.

Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.  It lacked the principle of representation.  The old Roman world knew nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote:  It knew nothing of representation]

Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were primary assemblies,—­town-meetings.  There was no notion of such a thing as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents.  The Roman’s only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a distance its military and civil functions.  When, therefore, the Roman popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one institution by means of which government could be carried on over so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote:  And therefore ended in despotism]

Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no difference.  Nobody would have known how to use it.  You cannot invent an institution as you would invent a plough.  Such a notion as that of representative government must needs start from small beginnings and grow in men’s minds until it should become part and parcel of their mental habits.  For the want of it the home government