political portion there is a foundation of fact; it is too
circumstantial, too consistent in itself, and at the same time too much
borne out by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The institutions which
we find existing in historic times must have been evolved by some such
struggle between the orders of patricians and plebeians as that which
Livy presents to us. And these politics, with their parties and sections
of parties, their shades of political character, the sustained interest
which they imply in political objects, their various devices and
compromises, are not the politics of a community of peasant farmers,
living apart each on his own farm and thinking of his own crops: they
are the politics of the quick-witted and gregarious population of an
industrial and commercial city. They are politics of the same sort as
those upon which the Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That
ancient Rome was a republic there can be no doubt. Even the so-called
monarchy appears clearly to have been elective; and republicanism may be
described broadly with reference to its origin, as the government of the
city and of the artisan, while monarchy and aristocracy are the
governments of the country and of farmers.

The legend which ascribes the assembly of centuries to the legislation
of Servius probably belongs to the same class as the legend which
ascribes trial by jury and the division of England into shires to the
legislation of Alfred. Still the assembly of centuries existed; it was
evidently ancient, belonging apparently to a stratum of institutions
anterior to the assembly of tribes; and it was a constitution
distributing political power and duties according to a property
qualification which, in the upper grades, must, for the period, have
been high, though measured by a primitive currency. The existence of
such qualifications, and the social ascendency of wealth which the
constitution implies, are inconsistent with the theory of a merely