narrow, and the enemy’s borders so close at hand, that any night the stout yeoman might find himself reduced to beggary, by seeing his crops destroyed, his cattle driven away, and his homestead burnt in a sudden foray.  The patricians and rich plebeians were, it is true, exposed to the same contingencies.  But wealth will always provide some defence; and it is reasonable to think that the larger proprietors provided places of refuge, into which they could drive their cattle and secure much of their property, such as the peel-towers common in our own border counties.  Thus the patricians and their clients might escape the storm which destroyed the isolated yeoman.

To this must be added that the public land seems to have been mostly in pasturage, and therefore the property of the patricians must have chiefly consisted in cattle, which was more easily saved from depredation than the crops of the plebeian.  Lastly, the profit derived from the trades and business of their clients, being secured by the walls of the city, gave to the patricians the command of all the capital that could exist in a state of society so simple and crude, and afforded at once a means of repairing their own losses, and also of obtaining a dominion over the poor yeoman.

For some time after the expulsion of the Tarquins it was necessary for the patricians to treat the plebeians with liberality.  The institutions of “the Commons’ King,” King Servius, suspended by Tarquin, were, partially at least, restored:  it is said even that one of the first consuls was a plebeian, and that he chose several of the leading plebeians into the senate.  But after the death of Porsenna, and when the fear of the Tarquins ceased, all these flattering signs disappeared.  The consuls seem still to have been elected by the Centuriate Assembly, but the Curiate Assembly retained in their own hands the right of conferring the Imperium, which amounted to a positive veto on the election by the larger body.  All the names of the early consuls, except in the first year of the Republic, are patrician.  But if by chance a consul displayed popular tendencies, it was in the power of the senate and patricians to suspend his power by the appointment of a dictator.  Thus, practically, the patrician burgesses again became the Populus, or body politic of Rome.

It must not here be forgotten that this dominant body was an exclusive caste; that is, it consisted of a limited number of noble families, who allowed none of their members to marry with persons born out of the pale of their own order.  The child of a patrician and a plebeian, or of a patrician and a client, was not considered as born in lawful wedlock; and however proud the blood which it derived from one parent, the child sank to the condition of the parent of lower rank.  This was expressed in Roman language by saying, that there was no “Right of Connubium” between patricians and any inferior classes of men.  Nothing can be more impolitic than such restrictions; nothing more hurtful even to those who count it their privilege.  In all exclusive or oligarchical,_pales_, families become extinct, and the breed decays both in bodily strength and mental vigor.  Happily for Rome, the patricians were unable long to maintain themselves as a separate caste.