then the prevailing language among
the Marsians and Picentes, continued in official use, but the Samnite
language which predominated in Southern Italy was placed side by
side with it on a footing of equality; and the two were made use of
alternately on the silver pieces which the new Italian state began to
coin in its own name after Roman models and after the Roman standard,
thus appropriating likewise the monopoly of coinage which Rome had
exercised for two centuries. It is evident from these arrangements--
and was, indeed a matter of course-that the Italians now no longer
thought of wresting equality of rights from the Romans, but purposed
to annihilate or subdue them and to form a new state. But it is also
obvious that their constitution was nothing but a pure copy of that
of Rome or, in other words, was the ancient polity handed down by
tradition among the Italian nations from time immemorial:--the
organization of a city instead of the constitution of a state, with
primary assemblies as unwieldy and useless as the Roman comitia, with
a governing corporation which contained within it the same elements
of oligarchy as the Roman senate, with an executive administered in
like manner by a plurality of coordinate supreme magistrates. This
imitation descended to the minutest details; for instance, the title
of consul or praetor held by the magistrate in chief command was
after a victory exchanged by the general of the Italians also for
the title of Imperator. Nothing in fact was changed but the name;
on the coins of the insurgents the same image of the gods appears, the
inscription only being changed from Roma to Italia. This Rome of the
insurgents was distinguished--not to its advantage--from the original
Rome merely by the circumstance, that, while the latter had at any
rate an urban development, and its unnatural position intermediate
between a city and a state had formed itself at least in a natural
way, the new Italia was nothing at all but a place of congress
for the insurgents, and it was by a pure fiction of law that the
inhabitants of the peninsula were stamped as burgesses of this new
capital. But it is significant that in this case, where the sudden
amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity
might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative
constitution in the modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs;
in fact the very opposite course was followed,(12) and the