[17] See the following chapter.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION.

  As once in virtue, so in vice extreme,
  This universal fabric yielded loose,
  Before ambition still; and thundering down,
  At last beneath its ruins crush’d a world.—­Thomson.

I. The most remarkable feature in the Roman constitution is the division of the people into Patricians and Plebeians, and our first inquiry must be the origin of this separation.  It is clearly impossible that such a distinction could have existed from the very beginning, because no persons would have consented in a new community to the investing of any class with peculiar privileges.  We find that all the Roman kings, after they had subdued a city, drafted a portion of its inhabitants to Rome; and if they did not destroy the subjugated place, garrisoned it with a Roman colony.  The strangers thus brought to Rome were not admitted to a participation of civic rights; they were like the inhabitants of a corporate town who are excluded from the elective franchise:  by successive immigrations, the number of persons thus disqualified became more numerous than that of the first inhabitants or old freemen, and they naturally sought a share in the government, as a means of protecting their persons and properties.  On the other hand, the men who possessed the exclusive power of legislation, struggled hard to retain their hereditary privileges, and when forced to make concessions, yielded as little as they possibly could to the popular demands.  Modern history furnishes us with numerous instances of similar struggles between classes, and of a separation in interests and feelings between inhabitants of the same country, fully as strong as that between the patricians and plebeians at Rome.

2.  The first tribes were divided by Ro’mulus into thirty cu’riae, and each cu’ria contained ten gentes or associations.  The individuals of each gens were not in all cases, and probably not in the majority of instances, connected by birth;[1] the attributes of the members of a gens, according to Cicero, were, a common name and participation in private religious rites; descent from free ancestors; the absence of legal disqualification. 3.  The members of these associations were united by certain laws, which conferred peculiar privileges, called jura gentium; of these the most remarkable were, the succession to the property of every member who died without kin and intestate, and the obligation imposed on all to assist their indigent fellows under any extraordinary burthen.[2] 4.  The head of each gens was regarded as a kind of father, and possessed a paternal authority over the members; the chieftancy was both elective and hereditary;[3] that is, the individual was always selected from some particular family.