submitted to judges and jurymen far remote from the scene and, if not involved in the like guilt, at least belonging to the same order as the accused - could from the first only reckon on success in the event of the wrong being clear and crying; and to complain in vain was almost certain destruction. The aggrieved no doubt found a sort of support in the hereditary relations of clientship, which the subject cities and provinces entered into with their conquerors and other Romans brought into close contact with them. The Spanish governors felt that no one could with impunity maltreat clients of Cato; and the circumstance that the representatives of the three nations conquered by Paullus - the Spaniards, Ligurians, and Macedonians - would not forgo the privilege of carrying his bier to the funeral pile, was the noblest dirge in honour of that noble man. But not only did this special protection give the Greeks opportunity to display in Rome all their talent for abasing themselves in presence of their masters, and to demoralize even those masters by their ready servility - the decrees of the Syracusans in honour of Marcellus, after he had destroyed and plundered their city and they had complained of his conduct in these respects to the senate in vain, form one of the most scandalous pages in the far from honourable annals of Syracuse - but, in connection with the already dangerous family-politics, this patronage on the part of great houses had also its politically perilous side. In this way the result perhaps was that the Roman magistrates in some degree feared the gods and the senate, and for the most part were moderate in their plundering; but they plundered withal, and did so with impunity, if they but observed such moderation. The mischievous rule became established, that in the case of minor exactions and moderate violence the Roman magistrate acted in some measure within his sphere and was in law exempt from punishment, so that those who were aggrieved had to keep silence; and from this rule succeeding ages did not fail to draw the fatal consequences. Nevertheless, even though the tribunals had been as strict as they were lax, the liability to a judicial reckoning could only check the worst evils. The true security for a good administration lay in a strict and uniform supervision by the supreme administrative authority: and this the senate utterly failed to provide. It was in this respect that the laxity and helplessness of the collegiate government became earliest apparent. By right the governors ought to have been subjected to an oversight far more strict and more special than had sufficed for the administration of Italian municipal affairs; and now, when the empire embraced great transmarine territories, the arrangements, through which the government preserved to itself the supervision of the whole, ought to have undergone a corresponding expansion. In both respects the reverse was the case. The governors ruled virtually as sovereign; and the most important of the institutions serving for the latter purpose, the census of the empire, was extended to Sicily alone, not to any of the provinces subsequently acquired. This emancipation of the supreme administrative officials from the central authority was more than hazardous. The Roman governor, placed at the head of the armies of the state, and in possession of considerable financial resources: subject to but a lax judicial control, and practically independent of the supreme administration; and impelled by a sort of necessity to separate the interest of himself and of the people whom he governed from that of the Roman community and to treat them as conflicting, far more resembled a Persian satrap than one of the commissioners of the Roman senate at the time of the Samnite wars. The man, moreover, who had just conducted a legalized military tyranny abroad, could with difficulty find his way back to the common civic level, which distinguished between those who commanded and those who obeyed, but not between masters and slaves. Even the government felt that their two fundamental principles - equality within the aristocracy, and the subordination of the power of the magistrates to the senatorial college - began in this instance to give way in their hands. The aversion of the government to the acquisition of new provinces and to the whole provincial system; the institution of the provincial quaestorships, which were intended to take at least the financial power out of the hands of the governors; and the abolition 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.
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
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 Caere and southward to Cumae; within this district there were only a few cities not included in it, such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, Norba, and Ferentinum. To this fell to be added the maritime colonies on the coasts of Italy which uniformly possessed the full Roman franchise, the Picenian and Trans-Apennine colonies of the most recent times, to which the franchise must have been conceded[38], and a very considerable number of Roman burgesses, who, without forming separate communities in a strict sense, were scattered throughout Italy in market-villages and hamlets (
