Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/291

Rh and this right of sanctioning the expenditure of the finances on the part of the Roman senate may be placed on a parallel in its effects with the right of sanctioning taxation in the constitutional monarchies of the present day. From the change in the relative positions of the magistrate and his council, the free admission and expulsion of senators must have also become practically restricted- The practice of holding the senatorial stalls for life, and perhaps even a sort of title to them in virtue of birth and of the occupation of certain offices, had already long possessed the sanction of custom; now such claims were necessarily put in a more definite shape, and custom acquired more and more the force of law.

The consequences followed as a matter of course. The first and most essential condition of all aristocratic government is, that the plenary power of the state be vested not in an individual but in a corporation. Now an essentially aristocratic corporation, the senate, had appropriated to itself the government, and at the same time the executive power not only remained in the hands of the nobility, but was also entirely subject to the governing corporation. It is true that a considerable number of men not belonging to the nobility sat in the senate; but as they were incapable of holding magistracies, and thus were excluded from all practical share in the government, they necessarily played a subordinate part in the senate also, and were moreover kept in pecuniary dependence on the corporation through the economically important privilege of using the public pasture. The formally absolute right of the patrician consuls to revise and modify the senatorial list at least every fourth year, however little may have been its effect in reference to the nobility, might very well be employed in their interest, and an obnoxious plebeian might by means of it be kept out of the senate or even be removed from its ranks. It is therefore quite true that the immediate effect of the revolution was to establish the aristocratic government.

It is not however the whole truth. While the majority of contemporaries probably thought that the revolution had brought upon the plebeians only a more inflexible despotism, we who come afterwards discern in that very revolution the germs of young liberty. What the patricians gained was gained at the expense not of the community, but of the magistrates' power. It is true the community gained only