Lectures and Essays | Page 5

of a system of barter; but without commerce there
could have been no currency at all.
Even more decisive is the proof afforded by the early political history
of Rome. In that wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt
enough of Livy himself to give him a high place among the masters of
fiction. It is the epic of a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted

for the purposes of education as the grand picture of Roman character
and the richest treasury of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt
that in the political portion there is a foundation of fact; it is too
circumstantial, too consistent in itself, and at the same time too much
borne out by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The institutions which
we find existing in historic times must have been evolved by some such
struggle between the orders of patricians and plebeians as that which
Livy presents to us. And these politics, with their parties and sections
of parties, their shades of political character, the sustained interest
which they imply in political objects, their various devices and
compromises, are not the politics of a community of peasant farmers,
living apart each on his own farm and thinking of his own crops: they
are the politics of the quick-witted and gregarious population of an
industrial and commercial city. They are politics of the same sort as
those upon which the Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That
ancient Rome was a republic there can be no doubt. Even the so-called
monarchy appears clearly to have been elective; and republicanism may
be described broadly with reference to its origin, as the government of
the city and of the artisan, while monarchy and aristocracy are the
governments of the country and of farmers.
The legend which ascribes the assembly of centuries to the legislation
of Servius probably belongs to the same class as the legend which
ascribes trial by jury and the division of England into shires to the
legislation of Alfred. Still the assembly of centuries existed; it was
evidently ancient, belonging apparently to a stratum of institutions
anterior to the assembly of tribes; and it was a constitution distributing
political power and duties according to a property qualification which,
in the upper grades, must, for the period, have been high, though
measured by a primitive currency. The existence of such qualifications,
and the social ascendency of wealth which the constitution implies, are
inconsistent with the theory of a merely agricultural and military Rome.
Who would think of framing such a constitution, say, for one of the
rural districts of France?
Other indications of the real character of the prehistoric Rome might be
mentioned. The preponderance of the infantry and the comparative
weakness of the cavalry is an almost certain sign of democracy, and of
the social state in which democracy takes its birth--at least in the case

of a country which did not, like Arcadia or Switzerland, preclude by its
nature the growth of a cavalry force, but on the contrary was rather
favourable to it. Nor would it be easy to account for the strong feeling
of attachment to the city which led to its restoration when it had been
destroyed by the Gauls, and defeated the project of a migration to Veii,
if Rome was nothing but a collection of miserable huts, the abodes of a
tribe of marauders. We have, moreover, the actual traces of an
industrial organization in the existence of certain guilds of artisans,
which may have been more important at first than they were when the
military spirit had become thoroughly ascendant.
Of course when Rome had once been drawn into the career of conquest,
the ascendency of the military spirit would be complete; war, and the
organization of territories acquired in war, would then become the great
occupation of her leading citizens; industry and commerce would fall
into disesteem, and be deemed unworthy of the members of the
imperial race. Carthage would no doubt have undergone a similar
change of character, had the policy which was carried to its greatest
height by the aspiring house of Barcas succeeded in converting her
from a trading city into the capital of a great military empire. So would
Venice, had she been able to carry on her system of conquest in the
Levant and of territorial aggrandisement on the Italian mainland. The
career of Venice was arrested by the League of Cambray. On Carthage
the policy of military aggrandisement, which was apparently resisted
by the sage instinct of the great merchants while it was supported by
the professional soldiers and the populace, brought utter ruin; while
Rome paid the inevitable penalty of military despotism. Even when the
Roman nobles had become a caste of conquerors and proconsuls, they
retained certain mercantile