Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/274

254 the Italians, and the freedmen, all of whom (whether they may have borne the name of burgesses, as did the plebeians and the freedmen, or not, as was the case with the Latins and Italians) were destitute of, and laid claim to, political equality.

A third distinction was one of a still more general nature; the distinction between the wealthy landholders and those who had been dispossessed or had become impoverished. The civil and political relations of Rome led to the rise of a numerous class of farmers—partly small proprietors who were dependent on the mercy of the capitalist partly, small temporary lessees who were dependent on the mercy of the landlord—and in many instances deprived individuals as well as whole communities of the lands which they held, without affecting their personal freedom. By these means the agricultural proletariate became even at an early period so powerful as to have a material influence on the destinies of the community. The urban proletariate acquired political importance only at a much later epoch.

On these distinctions hinged the internal history of Rome, and, as we may conjecture, not less the history, totally lost to us, of the other Italian communities. The political movement within the fully-privileged burgess-body, the war between the excluded and excluding classes, and the social conflicts between the landholders and the non-landholders—variously as they crossed and interlaced, and singular as were the alliances they often produced—were nevertheless essentially and fundamentally distinct.

As the Servian reform, which placed the metoikos on a footing of equality in a military point of view with the burgess, appears to have originated from considerations of an administrative nature rather than from any political party-tendency, we may assume that the first of the movements, which led to internal crises and changes of the constitution, was that which sought to accomplish the limitation of magisterial power. The earliest achievement of this, the most ancient opposition in Rome, consisted in the abolition of the life-tenure of the presidency of the community; in other words, in the abolition of the monarchy. How necessarily such a change was the result of the natural development of things is strikingly demonstrated by the fact, that the same change of constitution took place in an analogous manner through the whole circuit of the Italo-Grecian world. Not only in