government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its
functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central
government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our
President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to
make the government of the United States. The elements of a state
constituted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor
in the constitution of European society; and the American constitution
would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered
it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.

Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it
in the best way she could. At first it was a single tribe or people
distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a
second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual,
composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the Tities or Quirites, and,
afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or
Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided
into one hundred houses or gentes. Each house in each tribe was
represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number
of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
fixed. Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
cities. The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into
gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the
tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the
division was not a division of the powers of government between two
co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the
British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.

The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial
veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was
an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division
between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and
the particular. The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as
Niebuhr calls them--who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early
constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and
especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an
obstruc