Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/597

Rh formed the basis of representation. "A Hungarian county before the reforms of 1848 might be called a direct aristocrat! cal republic," all members of the noble class having a right to join the local assembly and vote in appointing a representative noble to the general Diet, but the inferior classes having no share in the government.

Other representative bodies than those of an exclusively aristocratic kind must be named as not falling within the scope of this chapter. As Duruy remarks: "Antiquity was not as ignorant as is supposed of the representative system. . . . Each Roman province had its general assemblies. . . . Thus the Lycians possessed a true legislative body formed by the deputies of their twenty-three towns. . . . This assembly had even executive functions." And Pavia, Gaul, Spain, all the eastern provinces, and Greece, had like assemblies. But, little as is known of them, the inference is tolerably safe that these were but distantly allied in genesis and position to the bodies we now distinguish as representative. Nor are we concerned with governing senates and councils elected by different divisions of a town-population, such as those which were variously formed in the Italian republics—bodies which served simply as agents whose doings were subject to the directly-expressed approval or disapproval of the assembled citizens. Here we must limit ourselves to that kind of representation which arises in communities occupying areas so large that their members are obliged to exercise by deputies such powers as they possess; and, further, we have to deal exclusively with cases in which the assembled deputies do not replace preexisting political agencies, but coöperate with them.

It will be well to set out by observing, more distinctly than we have hitherto done, what part of the primitive political structure it is from which the representative body, as thus conceived, originates.

Broadly, this question is tacitly answered by the contents of the preceding chapters. For, if, on occasions of public deliberation, the primitive horde spontaneously divides into the inferior many and the superior few, among whom some one is most influential; and if, in the course of the compounding and recompounding of groups which war brings about, the recognized war-chief develops into the king, while the superior few become the consultative body formed of minor military leaders—it follows that any third coördinate political power must be either the mass of the inferior itself, or else some agency acting on its behalf. Truism though this may be called, it is needful here to set it down; since, before inquiring under what circumstances the growth of a representative system follows the growth of popular power, we have to recognize the relation between the two.

The undistinguished mass, retaining a latent supremacy in simple societies not yet politically organized, though it is brought under restraint as fast as war establishes submission, and conquests produce