Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/295

Rh having fixt laws, to the end that the public judgments should no longer be the effect of a capricious will or of an arbitrary power. The senate after a great deal of resistance acquiesced; and decemvirs were nominated to compose those laws. It was thought proper to grant them an extraordinary power, because they were to give laws to parties whose views and interests it was almost impossible to unite. The nomination of all magistrates was suspended, and they were chosen in the comitia sole administrators of the republic. Thus they found themselves invested with the consular and the tribunitian power. By one they had the privilege of assembling the senate, by the other that of assembling the people. But they assembled neither senate nor people. Ten men only in the republic had the whole legislative, the whole executive, and the whole judiciary power. Rome saw herself enslaved by as cruel a tyranny as that of Tarquin. When Tarquin exercised his oppressions. Rome was seized with indignation at the power he had usurped; when the decemvirs exercised theirs, she was astonished at the power me had given.

What a strange system of tyranny! a tyranny carried on by men who had obtained the political and military power merely because of their knowledge in civil affairs; and who in the circumstances of that very time stood in need of the cowardice of the citizens to let themselves be insulted at home, and or their courage to protect them abroad?

The spectacle of Virginia's death, whom her father immolated to chastity and liberty, put an end to the power of the decemvirs. Every man became free, because every man had been injured; each shewed Rh