represented in its external
relations more firmly and worthily than Rome in its best times by
its senate. In matters of internal administration it certainly
cannot be concealed that the moneyed and landed aristocracy, which
was especially represented in the senate, acted with partiality in
affairs that bore upon its peculiar interests, and that the sagacity
and energy of the body were often in such cases employed far from
beneficially to the state. Nevertheless the great principle
established amidst severe conflicts, that all Roman burgesses were
equal in the eye of the law as respected rights and duties, and the
opening up of a political career (or in other words, of admission
to the senate) to every one, which was the result of that principle,
concurred with the brilliance of military and political successes in
preserving the harmony of the state and of the nation, and relieved
the distinction of classes from that bitterness and malignity which
marked the struggle of the patricians and plebeians. And, as the
fortunate turn taken by external politics had the effect of giving the
rich for more than a century ample space for themselves and rendered
it unnecessary that they should oppress the middle class, the Roman
people was enabled by means of its senate to carry out for a longer
term than is usually granted to a people the grandest of all human
undertakings--a wise and happy self-government.

Notes for Book II Chapter III

1. The hypothesis that legally the full -imperium- belonged to the
patrician, and only the military -imperium- to the plebeian, consular
tribunes, not only provokes various questions to which there is no
answer--as to the course followed, for example, in the event of the
election falling, as was by law quite possible, wholly on plebeians
--but specially conflicts with the fundamental principle of Roman
constitutional law, that the -imperium-, that is to say, the right
of commanding the burgess in name of the community, was functionally
indivisible and capable of no other limitation at all than a
territorial one. There was a province of urban law and a province
of military law, in the latter of which the -provocatio- and other
regulations of urban law were not applicable; there were magistrates,
such as the proconsuls, who were empowered to discharge functions
simply in the latter; but there were, in the strict sense of law,
no magistrates with merely jurisdictional, as there were none wi