nment under the forms
of civil equality.

The Censorship a Prop of the Nobility

These circumstances explain, why the censorship became the pivot of
the later republican constitution; why an office, originally standing
by no means in the first rank, came to be gradually invested with
external insignia which did not at all belong to it in itself and with
an altogether unique aristocratic-republican glory, and was viewed as
the crown and completion of a well-conducted public career; and why
the government looked upon every attempt of the opposition to
introduce their men into this office, or even to hold the censor
responsible to the people for his administration during or after his
term of office, as an attack on their palladium, and presented a
united front of resistance to every such attempt. It is sufficient
in this respect to mention the storm which the candidature of Cato for
the censorship provoked, and the measures, so extraordinarily reckless
and in violation of all form, by which the senate prevented the
judicial prosecution of the two unpopular censors of the year 550.
But with their magnifying the glory of the censorship the government
combined a characteristic distrust of this, their most important and
for that very reason most dangerous, instrument. It was thoroughly
necessary to leave to the censors absolute control over the personal
composition of the senate and the equites; for the right of exclusion
could not well be separated from the right of summoning, and it was
indispensable to retain such a right, not so much for the purpose of
removing from the senate capable men of the opposition--a course which
the smooth-going government of that age cautiously avoided--as for the
purpose of preserving around the aristocracy that moral halo, without
which it must have speedily become a prey to the opposition. The
right of ejection was retained; but what they chiefly needed was the
glitter of the naked blade--the edge of it, which they feared, they
took care to blunt. Besides the check involved in the nature of the
office--under which the lists of the members of the aristocratic
corporations were liable to revision only at intervals of five years
--and besides the limitations resulting from the right of veto vested
in the colleague and the right of cancelling vested in the successor,
there was added a farther check which exercised a very sensible
influence; a usage equivalent to law made it the duty of the