The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

CHAPTER XIX. PATRICIANS AND PLEBEIANS IN ROME.

There is a striking historical parallelism between the Anglo-Saxons in modern history and the Romans a thousand years before. The Romans conquered the world as the Anglo-Saxons are conquering the world. The Romans were the first race to found and maintain an empire as wide as the bounds of western civilization. Their characteristic qualities were, like those of the Anglo-Saxons, their supreme sense of duty, their respect for law, their great natural aptitude for government, their earnest practicality, their somewhat deficient sense of the beautiful, and their high military skill and discipline.

But before Rome could begin her march toward her later position as mistress of the world she had to rid herself of the domestic incubus of an internal oligarchy. The authentic history of Rome—for the earlier annals of her seven kings are little more than legends—opens with the struggle of the Plebeians—the mass of her people—to break down the hereditary domination of the privileged “caste,” the Patricians, who had a monopoly of political power, had appropriated the whole of the public land, and by unjust laws had burdened the Plebeians with taxes and debts, and reduced many of them to actual slavery.

In the year 495 B. C., there one day rushed into the crowded forum an old man, ragged and emaciated, his back covered with bloody stripes. He loudly proclaimed his history, which was that of hundreds of others. He had done service in several wars; his farm had been ravaged and burned, and his cattle driven away; to pay his taxes he had been forced into debt; his Patrician creditor had demanded a usurious interest, and had finally compelled him to work as a slave.

The occurrence created great excitement among the Plebeians, and would have provoked an outbreak had not messengers entered the city bearing the news that a Volucian army was marching to attack Rome. With their stern sense of patriotic duty, the disaffected citizens prepared to meet the foe, it being promised that their wrongs should be investigated after the war. They met and defeated the enemy, but the promise of the Patricians was not kept.

In despair of obtaining justice, the Plebeians decided to secede from the Commonwealth and to found a city on the Sacred Hill, three miles from Rome. This brought the Patricians to terms. Rather than lose the working force of the community, they agreed to release all those enslaved for debt, and to authorize the appointment of magistrates, called Tribunes, who should be chosen from the Plebeians, and should have the right of forbidding any act of oppression.

From that beginning the Plebeians advanced to full political and social enfranchisement, after a struggle that lasted for two centuries—a stern and bitter struggle, although it was waged “with a perseverance, forbearance, and moderation, of which there is scarcely a parallel in the history of the world.”[3] The next step was a law to compel the Patricians to pay rent for the public land they occupied. It was disregarded, and the Tribune Genucius, who attempted to enforce it, was murdered. Then by mutual agreement a body of commissioners (Decemvirs) was appointed to draw up a revised code of laws for all classes. Again the Plebeians had been deceived; the commissioners seized the executive power, and held it illegally and tyrannously until the Commons ended their usurpation by a second secession to the Sacred Hill.

The agrarian question remained a burning one until the Tribunes Licinius and Sextius forced a settlement of it by stopping the whole machinery of government until their propositions were accepted. The procedure was constitutional, but for ten years (376 to 366 B. C.) Rome was in a state of anarchy, and the fact that actual civil war was avoided testifies strongly to Roman self-restraint.

The legislative power was now the only one denied to the Plebeians. The Publican law was passed to give it to them, but the Patricians prevented its enforcement until by a third secession the Commons again carried their point, and at last secured final and complete equality between the classes. (286 B. C.)

Rome, once the mistress of the world, retained her grandeur only so long as the principles of true democracy pulsated through her body politic and nerved her every action. When prosperity, corruption, and abuse blinded the rulers to the claims of the Plebeians, then came revolution, civil war, decline, and finally the fall of the proudest empire known in the history of man.

So, the mightiest empire the world ever knew declined and fell before the power of the PEOPLE, who, outraged in their most sacred rights, revolted again and again, until, as may be said, the fabric, whose shadow reached to the uttermost ends of the earth, was torn asunder, and so went to fragments that not one stone was left upon another.