guli_. There can be no
doubt that Venice kept in view the prototypes transmitted by Rome, and
learned at last to draw a comparison between the two empires; and down
to the fifteenth century the odor of the Conscript Fathers lingered in
the Venetian fancy.

Subsequently to the entrance of the _dux_, _duke_, or _doge_ on the
scene, and the shrinkage of the tribunitial power to more departmental
or municipal proportions, the _master of the soldiers_, whatever he may
have been before, became a subordinate element in the administration.
His duties must have certainly embraced the management of the militia
and the maintenance of the doge's peace within the always widening pale
of the ducal abode. He was next in rank to the crown or throne.

Thus we perceive that, after a series of trials, the Venetians
eventually reverted to the form of government which appeared to be most
agreeable, on the whole, to their conditions and genius.

The consular _triumviri_, not perhaps quite independent of external
influences, were originally adopted as a temporary expedient. The
tribunes, who next succeeded, had a duration of two hundred and fifty
years. Their common _fasti_ are scanty and obscure; and we gain only
occasional glimpses of a barbarous federal administration, which barely
sufficed to fulfil the most elementary wants of a rising society of
traders. They were alike, more or less, a machinery of primitive type,
deficient in central force, and without any safeguards against the abuse
of authority, without any definite theory of legislation and police. The
century and a half which intervened between the abrogation of monarchy
in the person of a tribune, and its revival in the person of a doge
(574-697), beheld the republic laboring under the feeble and enervating
sway of rival aristocratic houses, on which the sole check was the urban
body subsequently to emerge into importance and value as the militia of
the six wards, and its commandant, the _master of the soldiers_.

But while the institution of the dogeship brought with it a certain
measure of equilibrium and security, it left the political framework in
almost every other respect untouched. The work of reform and
consolidation had merely commenced. The first stone only had been laid
of a great and enduring edifice. The first permanent step had been taken
toward the unification of a group of insular clanships into a
homogeneous society, with a sense of common interests.

The l