Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/104

84 entitled to act along with the king when there was to be a departure from existing rules. The royal power was, as Sallust says, at once absolute and limited by the laws (imperium legitimum); absolute, so far as the king's commands whether righteous not, must, in the first instance, be unconditionally complied with; limited, in so far as a command and contravening established usage, and not sanctioned by the true sovereign—the people—carried no permanent legal consequences. The oldest constitution of Rome was thus, in some measure, constitutional monarchy inverted. In that form of government the king is regarded as the possessor and bearer of the plenary power of the state; and accordingly acts of grace, for example, proceed solely from him, while the administration of the state belongs to the representatives of the people and to the executive responsible to them. In the Roman constitution the community of the people exercised very much the same functions as belong to the king in England: the right of pardon, which in England is the prerogative of the crown, was in Rome the prerogative of the community; while the ordinary operations of government devolved entirely on the crown.

If, in conclusion, we inquire as to the relation of the state itself to its individual members, we find the Roman state equally remote from the laxity of a mere defensive combination, and from the modern idea of an absolute omnipotence of the state. Checks from without, indeed, could still less be imposed upon the power of the state than upon the power of the king; but, as the very idea of legal right implies a limitation of that right, the power of the state was by no means without its limits. The community doubtless exercised power, over the person of the burgess in the imposition of public burdens, and in the punishment of offences and crimes; but any special law inflicting, or threatening to inflict, punishment on an individual on account of acts not universally recognized as penal, always appeared to the Romans, even when there was no flaw in point of form, an arbitrary and unjust proceeding. Far more restricted still was the power of the community in respect of the rights of property and the rights of family which were coincident rather than merely connected with these. In Rome the household was not absolutely annihilated, and the community aggrandized at its expense, as was the case in the police organization