There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives. The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble. All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently. The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their different degrees voted as the patron directed. A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or sentimental satisfaction.