The chief president gave the signal for their decision. In ordinary
cases they held up their hands, voting openly; but at a later period,
in cases where intimidation was possible, such as in the offences of
men of power and authority, they voted in secret. They met usually in
the vast arena of their market-place. [219]

XV. Recapitulating the heads of that complex constitution I have thus
detailed, the reader will perceive that the legislative power rested
in three assemblies--the Areopagus, the Council, and the Assembly of
the People--that the first, notwithstanding its solemn dignity and
vast authority, seldom interfered in the active, popular, and daily
politics of the state--that the second originated laws, which the
third was the great Court of Appeal to sanction or reject. The great
improvement of modern times has been to consolidate the two latter
courts in one, and to unite in a representative senate the sagacity of
a deliberative council with the interests of a popular assembly;--the
more closely we blend these objects, the more perfectly, perhaps, we
attain, by the means of wisdom, the ends of liberty.

XVI. But although in a senate composed by the determinations of
chance, and an assembly which from its numbers must ever have been
exposed to the agitation of eloquence and the caprices of passion,
there was inevitably a crude and imperfect principle,--although two
courts containing in themselves the soul and element of contradiction
necessarily wanted that concentrated oneness of purpose propitious to
the regular and majestic calmness of legislation, we cannot but allow
the main theory of the system to have been precisely that most
favourable to the prodigal exuberance of energy, of intellect, and of
genius. Summoned to consultation upon all matters, from the greatest
to the least, the most venerable to the most trite--to-day deciding on