Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/286

266 king now as formerly they had been to the king for life. The right of electing to the senate was exercised by the consuls just as formerly by the kings; even the custom of revising and filling up the lists of senators at every census, and as a rule therefore every fourth year, perhaps reached back to the regal period. The consul was not considered as a member of the senate any more than the king, and therefore in taking the votes did not include his own. No qualification for admission to the senate had ever existed, and therefore no legal innovation was involved in the admission of metœci (P. 71, 100); nevertheless it was an important practical change when, instead of non-patricians being received into the senate only singly perhaps and exceptionally (as was the case in the regal period), the blanks in the senate were now filled up so extensively from the ranks of the plebeians, .that—if tradition does not misinform us—of the 300 senators less than the half were full-burgesses (patres), while 164 were "added to the roll" (conscripti), and thus even in official style the senators were henceforth addressed as "full-burgesses and enrolled" (patres et conscripti).

Generally in the Roman commonwealth, even after the conversion of the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained. So far as a revolution in a state can be conservative at all, this one was so; not one of the constituent elements of the commonwealth was really overthrown by it. This circumstance indicates the character of the whole movement. The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the sorry and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a people carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the work of two great political parties already engaged in conflict and clearly aware that that conflict would steadily continue—the old burgesses and the metœci—who, like the English Whigs and Tories in 1688, were for a moment united by the common danger, which threatened to convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government of a despot, and differed again as soon as the danger was over. The old burgesses could not get rid of the monarchy without the co-operation of the new burgesses; but the new burgesses were far from being sufficiently strong to wrest the power out of the hands of the former at one blow. Compromises of this sort are necessarily limited to the smallest measure of mutual concessions obtained by tedious haggling, and they leave the future to decide which of the constituent