CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-CONCLUDED.
Though the constitution of the people is congenital, like the constitution of an individual, and cannot be radically changed without the destruction of the state, it must not be supposed that it is wholly withdrawn from the action of the reason and free-will of the nation, nor from that of individual statesmen.
All created things are subject to the law of development, and may be developed either in a good sense or in a bad; that is, may be either completed or corrupted.All the possibilities of the national constitution are given originally in the birth of the nation, as all the possibilities of mankind were given in the first man.The germ must be given in the original constitution.
But in all constitutions there is more than one element, and the several elements maybe developed pari passu, or unequally, one having the ascendency and suppressing the rest.In the original constitution of Rome the patrician element was dominant, showing that the patriarchal organization of society still retained no little force.The king was only the presiding officer of the senate and the leader of the army in war.His civil functions corresponded very nearly to those of a mayor of the city of New York, where all the effective power is in the aldermen, common council, and heads of departments.Except in name he was little else than a pageant.The kings, no doubt, labored to develop and extend the royal element of the constitution.This was natural;and it was equally natural that they should be resisted by the patricians.Hence when the Tarquins, or Etruscan dynasty, undertook to be kings in fact as well as in name, and seemed likely to succeed, the patricians expelled them, and supplied their place by two consuls annually elected.Here was a modification, but no real change of the constitution.The effective Power, as before, remained in the senate.
But there was from early times a plebeian element in the population of the city, though forming at first no part of the political people.Their origin is not very certain, nor their original position in the city.Historians give different accounts of them.But that they should, as they increased in numbers, wealth, and importance, demand admission into the political society, religious or solemn marriage, a voice in the government, and the faculty of holding civil and military offices, was only in the order of regular development.At first the patricians fought them, and, failing to subdue them by force, effected a compromise, and bought up their leaders.The concession which followed of the tribunitial veto was only a further development.By that veto the plebeians gained no initiative, no positive power, indeed, but their tribunes, by interposing it, could stop the proceedings of the government.
They could not propose the measures they liked, but they could prevent the legal adoption of measures they disliked--a faculty Mr.Calhoun asserted for the several States of the American Union in his doctrine of nullification, or State veto, as he called it.
It was simply an obstructive power.
But from a power to obstruct legislative action to the power to originate or propose it, and force the senate to adopt it through fear of the veto of measures the patricians had at heart, was only a still further development.This gained, the exclusively patrician constitution had disappeared, and Marius, the head of a great plebeian house, could be elected consul and the plebeians in turn threaten to become predominant, which Sylla or Sulla, as dictator, seeing, tried in vain to prevent.The dictator was provided for in the original constitution.Retain the dictatorship for a time, strengthen the plebeian element by ruthless proscriptions of patricians and by recruits from the provinces, unite the tribunitial, pontifical, and military powers in the imperator designated by the army, all elements existing in the constitution from an early day, and already developed in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, which retained to the last the senate and consuls, though with less and less practical power.These changes are very great, but are none of them radical, dating from the recognition ofthe plebs as pertaining to the Roman people.They are normal developments, not corruptions, and the transition from the consular republic to the imperial was unquestionably a real social and political progress.And yet the Roman people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the developments of their constitution.There was Providence in the course of events, but no fatalism.
Sulla was a true patrician, a blind partisan of the past.He sought to arrest the plebeian development led by Marius, and to restore the exclusively patrician government.But it was too late.
His proscriptions, confiscations, butcheries, unheard-of cruelties which anticipated and surpassed those of the French Revolution of , availed nothing.The Marian or plebeian movement, apparently checked for a moment, resumed its march with renewed vigor under Julius, and triumphed at Pharsalia.In vain Cicero, only accidentally associated with the patrician party, which distrusted him--in vain Cicero declaims, Cato scolds, or parades his impractical virtues, Brutus and Cassius seize the assassin's dagger, and strike to the earth "the foremost man of all the world;" the plebeian cause moves on with resistless force, triumphs anew at Philippi, and young Octavius avenges the murder of his uncle, and proves to the world that the assassination of a ruler is a blunder as well as a crime.In vain does Mark Antony desert the movement, rally Egypt and the barbaric East, and seek to transfer the seat of empire from the Tiber to the banks of the Nile or the Orontes; plebeian and imperial Rome wins a final victory at Actium, and definitively secures the empire of the civilized world to the West.
