Unless helped by something supplied
from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.
Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
nothing of representative assemblies.
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