higher station, instead of its being a line drawn, as every line should be, for the good of all;--when a household is in such a state, we may see in it the type of a badly ordered community. Such had been long the unhappy lot of Rome, until it began to strike on the minds of a few influential men, that no nation can be really great while the mass of its people are in a state of abject littleness. The majority of the patricians fortunately took an equally sensible view of their case, and arrived at the wise conclusion, that moderate privileges fairly held, and freely conceded, are preferable to any amount of exclusive advantage, improperly assumed on the one hand, and impatiently submitted to on the other. Happily for the patricians, they had among them a man bold enough to incorporate in a law the opinions of the main part of his own order, and strong enough to prevail over the weakness and prejudice of the meaner members of the body. The name of this patrician reformer was Q. Publilius Philo, who introduced three laws calculated to extend the basis of political power. By the first, the _curiæ_, consisting of patricians only, were compelled to confirm the laws passed by the centuries in which the two orders were mixed; by the second, the _plebiscita_, or decrees of the plebs, were to be binding on all Roman citizens; and the third provided, that there should always be one plebeian censor. These laws, though, perhaps, well adapted to the wants of the age, were not exactly such as we should hail with enthusiasm if they were to be brought forward in our own day by the head of a government. Depriving the curiæ of a veto was a measure equivalent to a proposition that the measures of the House of Commons should not require the concurrence of the House of Lords; and giving the force of law to a _plebiscitum_ was much the same thing as determining that every resolution of every public meeting should at once be embodied in the statute-book. Such an arrangement in the present day would render our laws a curiosity of legislative mosaic work, laid down without the advantage of uniformity or design. If the interpretation of an act of Parliament is sometimes difficult, we may conceive the utter hopelessness of the effort to understand the laws, if they were to consist of a body of resolutions pouring in constantly from Exeter Hall, or Freemasons' Tavern, and, occasionally, from a lamp-post in Trafalgar Square, or a cart on Kennington Common. With every due respect for the _plebiscita_--or resolutions of public meetings--we doubt whether any party would be desirous of accepting them as a substitute for our present method of law-making. The only chance of safety would be in the fact, that the _plebiscitum_ of to-morrow would be sure to repeal the _plebiscitum_ of to-day, and the best security for the state would consist in keeping a public meeting always assembled to negative every new proposition.