n prosperous and evil
days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual for
the general welfare and the comfort of the present for the advantage
of the future--all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so
high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all
censure is lost in reverent admiration. Even now good sense and
discretion still thoroughly predominated. The whole conduct of
the burgesses with reference to the government as well as to the
opposition shows quite clearly that the same mighty patriotism before
which even the genius of Hannibal had to quit the field prevailed also
in the Roman comitia. No doubt they often erred; but their errors
originated not in the mischievous impulses of a rabble, but in the
narrow views of burgesses and farmers. The machinery, however, by
means of which the burgesses intervened in the course of public
affairs became certainly more and more unwieldy, and the circumstances
in which they were placed through their own great deeds far outgrew
their power to deal with them. We have already stated, that in the
course of this epoch most of the former communities of passive
burgesses, 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 organ