As these states had been falsely considered monarchical, so, no less falsely, they had been taken as popular in character. The people referred to in this way does not coincide with, in fact it excludes, the plebs: the _"populus"_ was simply the patrician order, and freedom meant simply the freedom of the patricians, the liberty of the master: and the "_patria_" was appropriately so called, because it really was _res patrum,_ the property of a few fathers. It is absurd to think that the plebs, a horde of the most worthless labourers treated as slaves, could possess the right of electing the king, and that the fathers confined themselves to merely approving this election in the senate. The relations between fathers and plebeians were quite other than neighbourly peace, mutual trust and hearty co-operation. The heroes, according to a passage of Aristotle, took a solemn oath to be eternal enemies of the plebs: that was the form their democratic spirit took. And the "Roman virtue" which sets before us so many and such glorious examples, gives no example of kindliness to the common people. Brutus, who dedicated his house in the persons of his two sons to the cause of freedom: Scaevola, who terrified Porsena by punishing his own right hand in the fire: the stern Manlius, who executed his own son when he returned victorious through a successful breach of military discipline: Curtius, who leapt in full armour with his horse into the fatal chasm: Decius, who devoted himself for the safety of his army: Fabricius and Curius, who refused the Samnite gold and the kingdom of Pyrrhus: Attilius Regulus, who went to certain death to preserve the sanctity of a Roman's oath: what did these men ever do for the commons, except increase their miseries by war, plunge them deeper into the waters of usury, and immure them more closely in the private dungeons of the nobles where they were flogged bare-backed like the vilest slaves? And woe to any aristocrat who allowed himself the slightest desire to alleviate these miseries! He was promptly accused of sedition and treason and sent to his death; the fate that in Rome befel Manlius Capitolinus, who saved the Capitol from the fires of the Gaul, and yet for his democratic sympathies was thrown from the Tarpeian rock; the fate that came in Sparta, the hero-city of Greece as Rome was the hero-city of the world, to the great-souled king Agis, the Manlius Capitolinus of Lacedaemon, who, for trying to lighten the burden of the unhappy commons by a law abolishing debts and to aid them by another giving them testamentary rights, was strangled by the ephors. The famous "Roman virtue" amazes any one who is obsessed by the modern idea of a virtue consisting in justice and benevolence to all mankind. What virtue could live with such pride? What moderation with such avarice? What mercy with such cruelty? What justice with such inequality?