In such a kingdom or commonwealth, whatever powers, great or small, this or that board or council has, are held according to the law of the land. As long as those powers are exercised according to the law of the land, no administrative interference is to be feared; if the law is broken, if the local authority steps beyond its legal powers, the wrong will be made good, not by an arbitrary will, but by a legal process. It was wholly different with the cities of which we speak, whether free, dependent, or subject; they were still separate commonwealths with inherent rights, even if those rights could no longer be exercised; their assemblies had once been parliaments, and to both the forms and the feelings of parliaments they still clave. And one city at least among the allies of Rome kept its substantial freedom down to an age when many fancy that the Roman power itself had altogether vanished from the earth. The freedom of Cherson was overthrown, not by Mummius in the second century on one side, not by Vespasian in the first century on the other, but by the Amorian Theophilos in the ninth. Till that day the last of the Greek commonwealths lived on its ancient life, and for the simplest of reasons. Not only the Emperor himself, but the proconsul of Achaia, of Macedonia, or of Asia, could at any moment encroach on, the Emperor could at any moment destroy, the freedom of any Greek city that lay geographically within those provinces. He had always the physical power to encroach or to destroy; not uncommonly he had the will. But the commonwealth which lay far away in the Tauric Chersonêsos stood in another case. The faithful ally could not be changed into the helpless subject, except by the same kind of effort which was needed for a Gothic or a Persian war.