as well as a considerable number of newly established
colonies, received the full Roman franchise.(37) At the close of this
period the Roman burgess-body, in a tolerably compact mass, filled
Latium in its widest sense, Sabina, and a part of Campania, so that it
reached on the west coast northward to Caere and southward to Cumae;
within this district there were only a few cities not included in it,
such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, Norba, and Ferentinum. To this
fell to be added the maritime colonies on the coasts of Italy which
uniformly possessed the full Roman franchise, the Picenian and Trans-
Apennine colonies of the most recent times, to which the franchise
must have been conceded,(38) and a very considerable number of Roman
burgesses, who, without forming separate communities in a strict
sense, were scattered throughout Italy in market-villages and hamlets
(-fora et conciliabula-). To some extent the unwieldiness of a civic
community so constituted was remedied, for the purposes of justice(39)
and of administration, by the deputy judges previously mentioned;(40)
and already perhaps the maritime(41) and the new Picenian and Trans-
Apennine colonies exhibited at least the first lineaments of the
system under which afterwards smaller urban communities were organized
within the great city-commonwealth of Rome. But in all political
questions the primary assembly in the Roman Forum remained alone
entitled to act; and it is obvious at a glance, that this assembly
was no longer, in its composition or in its collective action, what
it had been when all the persons entitled to vote could exercise their
privilege as citizens by leaving their farms in the morning and
returning home the same evening. Moreover the government--whether
from want of judgment, from negligence, or from any evil design, we
cannot tell--no longer as formerly enrolled the communities admitted
to the franchise after 513 in newly instituted election-districts, but
included them along with others in the old; so that gradually each
tribe came to be composed of different townships scattered over the
whole Roman territory. Election-districts such as these, containing
on an average 8000--the urban naturally having more, the rural fewer
--persons entitled to vote, without local connection or inward unity,
no longer admitted of any definite leading or of any satisfactory
previous deliberation; disadvantages which must have been the more
felt, since the vo