be into a hundred houses or gentes was not local,
but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the
individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of
kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with
our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into
tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans. The adopted member
was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited
its goods. Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the
three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the
house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by
houses, not by individuals en masse. After all, practically the Roman
senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for
no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of noble blood.
The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being
included in the three tribes, when they came to be a power in the
republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and
patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or
territorial people.

The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the
right to participate in political power, was the domain of the state,
and the tenant held it from the state. The domain was vested in the
state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica,
not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from
barbarism. In all other respects the Roman constitution was no more
republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and
introduced the principle of territorial democracy. The division into
demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial
division, not personal nor genealogical. And if the equality of all
men was not recognized, all who were included in the political class
stood on the same footing. Athens and other Greek cities, though
conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on
Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors
than it had been under the patrician senate, which the assassins of
Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they
represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship
were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian