The Beginnings of New England | Page 9

it consistently until the people
of all parts of the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law.
In theory, I say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in
the Roman system to prevent it from achieving permanent success.
Historians have been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole
system was impaired by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political
economy which taxes all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching
view of civil office which regards it as private perquisite and not as
public trust, and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of

feeding an idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of
these deadly social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of
the last we have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to
promote mendicancy under the specious guise of fostering education or
rewarding military services. And is it not a striking illustration of the
slowness with which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom
and of justice, that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at
the cost of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth
have got rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of
antiquity and fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the
employers, and loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]
These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the
fact that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something
supplied from outside the Roman world, civilization must have
succumbed to these evils, the progress of mankind must have been
stopped. What was needed was the introduction of a fierce spirit of
personal liberty and local self-government. The essential vice of the
Roman system was that it had been unable to avoid weakening the
spirit of personal independence and crushing out local self-government
among the peoples to whom it had been applied. It owed its wonderful
success to joining Liberty with Union, but as it went on it found itself
compelled gradually to sacrifice Liberty to Union, strengthening the
hands of the central government and enlarging its functions more and
more, until by and by the political life of the several parts had so far
died away that, under the pressure of attack from without, the Union
fell to pieces and the whole political system had to be slowly and
painfully reconstructed.
Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to the
essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of

representation]
Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies
were primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such
a thing as political power delegated by the people to representatives
who were to wield it away from home and out of sight of their
constituents. The Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of
authority delegated by the government to its generals and prefects who
discharged at a distance its military and civil functions. When,
therefore, the Roman popular government, originally adapted to a
single city, had come to extend itself over a large part of the world, it
lacked the one institution by means of which government could be
carried on over so vast an area without degenerating into despotism.
[Sidenote: And therefore ended in despotism]
Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of
some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have
made no difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You
cannot invent an institution as you would invent a plough. Such a
notion as that of representative government must needs start from small
beginnings and grow in men's minds until it should become part and
parcel of their mental habits. For the want of it the home government at
Rome became more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands
of the army, while at the same time the administration of the empire
became more and more centralized; the people of its various provinces,
even while their social condition was in some respects improved, had
less and less voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the
spirit of personal independence was gradually weakened. This
centralization was greatly intensified by the perpetual danger