The American Republic [128]
strictly territorial distinctions, and the division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans. The adopted member was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited its goods. Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse. After all, practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of noble blood. The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being included in the three tribes, when they came to be a 395 power in the republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or territorial people.
The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state, and the tenant held it from the state. The domain was vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from barbarism. In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of territorial democracy. The division into demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not personal nor genealogical. And if the equality of all men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class stood on the same footing. Athens and other Greek cities, though conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they 396 represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude. It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than men and without political rights. Practically, power was an attribute of birth and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and noble few.
The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under 397 Justinian in the sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents
The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state, and the tenant held it from the state. The domain was vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from barbarism. In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of territorial democracy. The division into demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not personal nor genealogical. And if the equality of all men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class stood on the same footing. Athens and other Greek cities, though conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they 396 represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude. It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than men and without political rights. Practically, power was an attribute of birth and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and noble few.
The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under 397 Justinian in the sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents