something else in the mixed constitution of Rome besides the tried wisdom and the great practical weight of the Senate. What was that? There was, in the first place, the evil of an elective kingship--for the Consul was really an annual king under a different name, as the President of the United States is a quadriennial king, with greatly more power while his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great Britain; and this implied an annual fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of a germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance under the strong stimulant of the love of power. Then, as in the natural growth of society, a new aristocracy grew up, formed by the addition of the wealthy plebeian families to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a new and numerous plebeian body, practically though not legally excluded from the privilege of the _optimates_, the old antagonism of patrician and plebeian would revive, and the question arose, What machinery had the legislation of the previous centuries provided to prevent a collision and a rupture between the antagonistic tendencies of the democratic and oligarchic elements in the State? The answer is, None. The authority of the Senate, great as it was both morally and numerically, was antagonised by the co-equal legislative authority of the _Comitia Tributa_--an assembly as open to any agitator for factious or revolutionary purposes as a meeting of a London mob in Hyde Park, and composed of elements of the most motley and loose description, ready at any moment to give the solemn sanction of a national ordinance to any act of hasty violence or calculated party move which might flatter the vanity or feed the craving of the masses. But this was not all. The tribunate, originally appointed simply for the protection of the commonalty against the rude exercise of patrician power, had now grown to such formidable dimensions that the popular tribune of the day might become the most powerful man in the State, and only require re-election to constitute him into a king whose decrees the consuls and the senators must humiliate themselves to register. Here was a machinery cunningly, one might think, constructed for the purpose of working out its own disruption, even supposing both the popular and aristocratic elements had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high sense of honour, the proud inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils of conquest; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome; lords of the soil, not fathers of the people; banded together for the narrow interests of their own order rather than for the general well-being of the community. The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the mass of the original popular assemblies had been composed, had partly