on the Palatine hill.

[16] See Chap. XII. Sect. V. of the following History.

[17] See the following chapter.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV.

THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION.

As once in virtue, so in vice extreme,
This universal fabric yielded loose,
Before ambition still; and thundering down,
At last beneath its ruins crush'd a world.--_Thomson_.

I. The most remarkable feature in the Roman constitution is the
division of the people into Patricians and Plebeians, and our first
inquiry must be the origin of this separation. It is clearly
impossible that such a distinction could have existed from the very
beginning, because no persons would have consented in a new community
to the investing of any class with peculiar privileges. We find that
all the Roman kings, after they had subdued a city, drafted a portion
of its inhabitants to Rome; and if they did not destroy the subjugated
place, garrisoned it with a Roman colony. The strangers thus brought
to Rome were not admitted to a participation of civic rights; they
were like the inhabitants of a corporate town who are excluded from
the elective franchise: by successive immigrations, the number of
persons thus disqualified became more numerous than that of the first
inhabitants or old freemen, and they naturally sought a share in the
government, as a means of protecting their persons and properties. On
the other hand, the men who possessed the exclusive power of
legislation, struggled hard to retain their hereditary privileges, and
when forced to make concessions, yielded as little as they
possibly could to the popular demands. Modern history furnishes us
with numerous instances of similar struggles between classes, and of a
separation in interests and feelings between inhabitants of the same
country, fully as strong as that between the patricians and plebeians
at Rome.

2. The first tribes were divided by Ro'mulus into thirty _cu'riae,_ and
each cu'ria contained ten _gentes_ or associations. The individuals of
each gens were not in all cases, and probably not in the majority of
instances, connected by birth;[1] the attributes of the members of a
_gens_, according to Cicero, were, a common name and participation in
private religious rites; descent from free ancestors; the absence of
legal disqualification. 3. The members of these associations were
united by certain laws, which conferred peculiar privileges, called
jura gentium; of