One of the first acts ascribed to Servius was the institution of the census. Livy pronounces the census a most salutary measure for an empire about to become so great, according to which the duties of peace and of war were to be performed, not individually as before, but according to the measure of personal wealth.[388] Each person was required to enroll himself in the ward of his residence, with a statement of the amount of his property. It was done in the presence of the censor; and the lists when completed furnished the basis upon which the classes were formed.[389] This was accompanied by a very remarkable act for the period, the creation of four city wards, circumscribed by boundaries, and distinguished by appropriate names. In point of time it was earlier than the institution of the Attic deme by Cleisthenes; but the two were quite different in their relations to the government. The Attic deme, as has been shown, was organized as a body politic with a similar registry of citizens and of their property, and having besides a complete local self-government, with an elective magistracy, judiciary and priesthood. On the other hand, the Roman ward was a geographical area, with a registry of citizens and of their property, with a local organization, a tribune and other elective offices, and with an assembly. For a limited number of special objects the inhabitants of the wards were dealt with by the government through their territorial relations. But the government of the ward did not possess the solid attributes of that of the Attic deme. It was a nearer copy of the previous Athenian naucrary, which not unlikely furnished the model, as the Solonian classes did of the Servian. Dionysius remarks, that after Servius Tullius had inclosed the seven hills with one wall he divided the city into four parts, and gave the names of the hills to the re-divisions: to the first, Palatina, to the second, Suburra, to the third, Collina, and to the fourth, Esquilina; and made the city consist of four parts, which before consisted of three; and he ordered the people who dwelt in each of the four regions, like villagers, not to take any other dwelling, nor to pay taxes elsewhere, nor give in their names as soldiers elsewhere, nor pay their assessments for military purposes and other needs, which each must furnish for the common welfare; for these things were no longer to be done according to the three consanguine tribes (φυλὰς τὰς γενικὰς), but according to the four local tribes (φυλὰς τὰς τοπικὰς), which last had been arranged by himself; and he appointed commanders over each tribe, as phylarchs or comarchs, whom he directed to note what house each inhabited.[390] Mommsen observes that “each of these four levy-districts had to furnish the fourth part not only of the force as a whole, but of each of its military subdivisions, so that each legion and each century numbered an equal proportion of conscripts from each region; evidently for the purpose of merging all distinctions of a gentile and local nature in one common levy of the community, and especially of binding, through the powerful leveling influence of the military spirit, the meteoci and the burgesses into one people.”[391]
In like manner, the surrounding country under the government of Rome was organized in townships (tribus rusticae), the number of which is stated at twenty-six by some writers, and at thirty-one by others; making, with the four city wards, a total of thirty in one case, and of thirty-five in the other.[392] The total number was never increased beyond thirty-five. These townships did not become integral in the sense of participating in the administration of the government.
As finally established under the Servian constitution, the government was cast in the form in which it remained during the existence of the republic; the consuls taking the place of the previous military commanders. It was not based upon territory in the exclusive sense of the Athenian government, or in the modern sense; ascending from the township or ward, the unit of organization, to the county or arrondissement, and from the latter to the state, each organized and invested with governmental functions as constituents of a whole. The central government overshadowed and atrophied the parts. It rested more upon property than upon territory, this being made the commanding element, as is shown by the lodgment of the controlling power of the government in the highest property classes. It had, nevertheless, a territorial basis as well, since it recognized and used territorial subdivisions for citizenship, and for financial and military objects, in which the citizen was dealt with through his territorial relations.
The Romans were now carried fairly out of gentile society into and under the second great plan of government, founded upon territory and upon property. They had left gentilism and barbarism behind them, and entered upon a new career of civilization. Henceforth the creation and protection of property became the primary objects of the government, with a superadded career of conquest for domination over distant tribes and nations. This great change of institutions, creating political society as distinguished from gentile society, was simply the introduction of the new elements of territory and property, making the latter a power in the government, which before had been simply an influence. Had the wards and rustic townships been organized with full powers of local self-government, and the senate been made elective by these local constituencies without distinction of classes, the resulting government would have been a democracy, like the Athenian; for these local governments would have moulded the state into their own likeness. The senate, with the hereditary rank it conferred, and the property basis qualifying the voting power in the assembly of the people, turned the scale against democratical institutions, and produced a mixed government, partly aristocratic and partly democratic; eminently calculated to engender perpetual animosity between the two classes of citizens thus deliberately and unnecessarily created by affirmative legislation. It is plain, I think, that the people were circumvented by the Servian constitution, and had a government put upon them which the majority would have rejected had they fully comprehended its probable results. The evidence is conclusive of the antecedent democratical principles of the gentes, which, however exclusive as against all persons not in their communion, were carried out fully among themselves. The evidence of this free spirit and of their free institutions is so decisive that the proposition elsewhere stated, that gentilism is incompatible with monarchy, seems to be incontrovertible.
As a whole, the Roman government was anomalous. The overshadowing municipality of Rome, made the centre of the state in its plan of government, was one of the producing causes of its novel character. The primary organization of the people into an army with the military spirit it fostered created the cohesive force which held the republic together, and afterwards the empire. With a selective senate holding office for life, and possessing substantial powers; with a personal rank passing to their children and descendants; with an elective magistracy graded to the needs of a central metropolis; with an assembly of the people organized into property classes, possessing an unequal suffrage, but holding both an affirmative and a negative upon all legislation; and with an elaborate military organization, no other government strictly analogous has appeared among men. It was artificial, illogical, approaching a monstrosity; but capable of wonderful achievements, because of its military spirit, and because the Romans were endowed with remarkable powers for organizing and managing affairs. The patchwork in its composition was the product of the superior craft of the wealthy classes who intended to seize the substance of power while they pretended to respect the rights and interests of all.
When the new political system became established, the old one did not immediately disappear. The functions of the senate and of the military commander remained as before; but the property classes took the place of the gentes, and the assembly of the classes took the place of the assembly of the gentes. Radical as the changes were, they were limited, in the main, to these particulars, and came in without friction or violence. The old assembly (comitia curiata) was allowed to retain a portion of its powers, which kept alive for a long period of time the organizations of the gentes, curiæ and consanguine tribes. It still conferred the imperium upon all the higher magistrates after their election was completed, though in time it became a matter of form merely; it inaugurated certain priests, and regulated the religious observances of the curiæ. This state of things continued down to the time of the first Punic war, after which the comitia curiata lost its importance and soon fell into oblivion. Both the assembly and the curiæ were superseded rather than abolished, and died out from inanition; but the gentes remained far into the empire, not as an organization, for that also died out in time, but as a pedigree and a lineage. Thus the transition from gentile into political society was gradually but effectually accomplished, and the second great plan of human government was substituted by the Romans in the place of the first which had prevailed from time immemorial.
After an immensely protracted duration, running back of the separate existence of the Aryan family, and received by the Latin tribes from their remote ancestors, the gentile organization finally surrendered its existence, among the Romans, to to the demands of civilization. It had held exclusive possession of society through these several ethnical periods, and until it had won by experience all the elements of civilization, which it then proved unable to manage. Mankind owe a debt of gratitude to their savage ancestors for devising an institution able to carry the advancing portion of the human race out of savagery into barbarism, and through the successive stages of the latter into civilization. It also accumulated by experience the intelligence and knowledge necessary to devise political society while the institution yet remained. It holds a position on the great chart of human progress second to none in its influence, in its achievements and in its history. As a plan of government, the gentile organization was unequal to the wants of civilized man; but it is something to be said in its remembrance that it developed from the germ the principal governmental institutions of modern civilized states. Among others, as before stated, out of the ancient council of chiefs came the modern senate; out of the ancient assembly of the people came the modern representative assembly, the two together constituting the modern legislature; out of the ancient general military commander came the modern chief magistrate, whether a feudal or constitutional king, an emperor or a president, the latter being the natural and logical result; and out of the ancient custos urbis, by a circuitous derivation, came the Roman praetor and the modern judge. Equal rights and privileges, personal freedom and the cardinal principles of democracy were also inherited from the gentes. When property had become created in masses, and its influence and power began to be felt in society, slavery came in; an institution violative of all these principles, but sustained by the selfish and delusive consideration that the person made a slave was a stranger in blood and a captive enemy. With property also came in gradually the principle of aristocracy, striving for the creation of privileged classes. The element of property, which has controlled society to a great extent during the comparatively short period of civilization, has given mankind despotism, imperialism, monarchy, privileged classes, and finally representative democracy. It has also made the career of the civilized nations essentially a property-making career. But when the intelligence of mankind rises to the height of the great question of the abstract rights of property,—including the relations of property to the state, as well as the rights of persons to property,—a modification of the present order of things may be expected. The nature of the coming changes it may be impossible to conceive; but it seems probable that democracy, once universal in a rudimentary form and repressed in many civilized states, is destined to become again universal and supreme.
An American, educated in the principles of democracy, and profoundly impressed with the dignity and grandeur of those great conceptions which recognize the liberty, equality and fraternity of mankind, may give free expression to a preference for self-government and free institutions. At the same time the equal rights of every other person must be recognized to accept and approve any form of government, whether imperial or monarchical, that satisfies his preferences.