fluence of moral limitation. This moral limitation can be traced very plainly as acting even on the Rex. He is expected to ask advice, and probably also to take it. His advising body was the Senate, the equivalent of the Homeric γερουσία, of which we shall have more to say presently; and the principle which in form, if not always in fact, governed the Roman magistrate for ever afterwards, that he should not act without the advice of this council, became so much a necessary law of the Roman mind that we may be certain that it had its origin in the monarchy. Again, we have reason to believe that in the trial of accused persons of importance the king was expected, though by no means legally bound, to submit the question of life and death to the people for their decision; if this be so, another great principle which became the charter of republican liberty as the jus provocationis, a right of appeal against the decision of the magistrate, also had its origin in the moral obligations of the Rex.[1]
In the Roman monarchy, then, we see the earliest form of State government completely and judiciously developed. Order and discipline, so necessary to man in his political childhood, are there represented by the technically unlimited power of the Rex; while in the salutary moral obligations which the good sense of the people has imposed on this magistrate, we find customary rules of conduct
- ↑ Both these principles may have grown out of germs of great antiquity, and were not the peculiar invention of the Romans. But it is not given to every people to fertilise such germs, and convert them into plain and formal principles of constitutional action.
