was the general habit and feeling of the ancient world. In every part of Southern Europe, in Italy, in Sicily, in Spain, in Gaul, and above all in Greece, the self-governing town was the true political unit. In the writings of all the great thinkers of antiquity, the idea of the autonomous city is accepted as the indispensable basis of political speculation.* In their mind and in their language the city and the state were one and the same. The city must indeed be of a certain size. A mere village was unable to supply those arrangements for the proper conduct of public business which the higher class of minds in those times regarded as essential. No organization less than the city could satisfy the wants of an intelligent freeman. But no other organization could include the city. The city was itself a perfect and self-sufficing whole, and did not admit of incorporation into any higher political unity. In those small states where the feelings for the corporation and for the country were so strangely blended, the sentiment of loyalty, or rather of devotion to the city, was developed in a very high degree. The state was not regarded as composed of the sum of its members and existing for them. It was held to have a separate and a higher existence. Aristotle observes † that the city precedes the individual as the whole precedes the part. All the rights that any Athenian or Roman enjoyed were his, not from any personal claim, but because he was a citizen of Athens or of Rome. It was, therefore, at once the highest privilege and the most urgent duty of each citizen to serve the state in his own person, whether at home or in the field. He was bound to accept any office that the state might place in his hands. He was bound to assist his fellow-citizens in enacting the laws by which the city should be governed, and in selecting the officers by whom her peace should be preserved and her honour defended. Thus grew up the feeling that political rights must be exercised in person, and in the General Assembly of the Citizens. No delegation was admissible; and in no other place and under no other conditions than in the Ecclesia or the Comitia duly convened in the customary meetingplace of the city could these duties be performed. If a citizen left his native city, he ceased to retain his full civic rights. The Hellenic emigrant lost all legal connection with the parent state, and became an additional unit in the Hellenic aggregate. Only the moral tie which bound him to his metropolis was stronger than that which bound him to any other kindred city. The Roman colonist was sent forth on a special service, and so retained his old allegiance. But he, too, lost the rights he could no longer exercise; the new community was not part of Rome, because it was the son and subject of Rome. In certain circumstances the colonist was permitted to return, and then he resumed his former position.* So, too, if a Roman citizen were taken in war, his status was suspended; but if he escaped or were released and returned, the suspension was removed, and he resumed, though not always as of course, his former rights. Perhaps the most decisive proof that we possess of this cardinal doctrine of antiquity, namely, that a free constitution is inseparable from the appearance of the sovereign people in person in their collective assemblies, is found in the relation of the Italian states with each other and with Rome. When in the course of the social war the Italian states had resolved to destroy Rome, or at all events to secede from it, and to found a new state, they could devise * See Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities, Title Fostliminium. no other polity than that which had been traditionary among them from time immemorial. When they might have established the constitution of a state, they merely founded the organization of a town. The Urbs Italia was to supersede the Urbs Roma. "It is significant," says Dr. Mommsen,* "that in this case, when the sudden amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative constitution in its modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs; in fact, the very opposite course was followed, and the communal organization was simply reproduced in a far more absurd manner than before." Subsequently, when Rome had triumphed, but had yielded after the war all the political privileges that before the war she had refused, her own condition was such as both to suggest and urgently to require some form of representation for her more remote citizens. The burghers now no longer lived in the city or in its immediate vicinity. The people of Quirinus, if it did not yet include all the inhabitants of the Peninsula, comprised all the dwellers between the Rubicon and the Sicilian Straits. It was absurd to suppose that this population could habitually meet for the transaction of business in the Roman Forum. Yet the votes of the Italian freeholders might on many an occasion have counteracted the venal voices of the "Turba Remi." To none, however, of the statesmen of the day, neither to the philosophic Cicero, nor to the great and liberal Julius, nor to his nephew, skilful though he was in public organization, did the simple expedient of representation present itself. Augustus alone seems to have made some partial attempt to establish local polling places,† where the votes might * Hist. of Rome, iii. 239. + Merivale, Hist. of the Romans, iii. 499. be taken and transmitted to Rome. Even this project seems to have been either unsuccessful, or to have become, as the Imperial Government grew stronger, unnecessary. When the Empire was hastening to its fall, the Emperors attempted to check the speed of its dissolution by a sort of Confederation of the Provinces. A rescript was issued by Honorius and Valentinian,* establishing for the Gallic Provinces at Arles in the South of France a yearly meeting of public functionaries, proprietors of domains, and judges of provinces or their deputies. Even in this proceeding we cannot, I think, trace any approach to representation. At most, some kind of federation would have been formed of which the Government would have consisted of the officials of each separate state. The project, however, entirely failed. "The Roman world had returned to its first condition; towns had constituted it; it dissolved, and towns remained." + It was not only that by the custom and the religious sentiments of the city state the citizen's personal service in public affairs was necessary. Even in the business of private life, agency, as we understand the term, was unknown. A contract with an agent could be effected only by a trust, of which for a long time the state took no notice. A contract by an agent could seldom be effected at all. This condition of the law arose from the structure of archaic society. Each archaic household was distinct, complete, and self-sufficing. It contained many members, under a directing chief or Pater; and all acquisitions by its several members were made not for their own use but for the corporation. Further, as the household was supposed to consist not of living members only, but also of the spirits of their male ancestors, the services of strangers were thought to be unacceptable to those invisible guardians of the household's fortunes. Hence arose the twofold rule of Roman law which declared * that acquisitions might be made for a House Father by those who were in his manus, and might not be so made by any free person outside that description. It was but slowly and sparingly that this rule was relaxed. First, in proceedings before a Judex, a representative (cognitor) was allowed. When Roman commerce was extended, and when Roman business houses were established beyond Italy, the shipmaster and the manager were permitted to bind their respective principals. Then, by way of analogy, this limited right was extended to a few other cases. Beyond this point † the Roman law of contract does not seem to have gone. Even if, as some writers have contended, a true system of agency were established in the later Roman law, this result was not obtained until many centuries after the maturity of its constitutional organization. It is not, then, a matter of surprise that when the doctrine of agency was unfamiliar, if not unknown, in the simpler cases of private business, it should not have been practised in the more complex affairs of political life. § 2. The idea of political representation is thus of comparatively recent date. It is, in fact, both much more recent and much less general than we might at first be Representainclined to suppose. In England, where its tion: why development has been most complete, it dates from about the middle of the thirteenth century. used in England. In Spain its date was about a century earlier. In other parts of Europe it commenced at a somewhat later period. Nowhere, however, has it been carried out with such * Just. Inst. II., ix. Pr. and 5. + Mr. Hunter's Roman Law, 441. |