The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty by John Fiske
page 34 of 257 (13%)
page 34 of 257 (13%)
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fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development] These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union, but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed. Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making. It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of representation] Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an |
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