before the publication of this last edition, appeared a separate work,* in which these questions are discussed in detail, and with full citations from ancient writers.

For the time of the monarchy, we find rather modifications than a fundamental change of opinion. In p. 63, the view is insisted on, which is hardly more than hinted at in the earlier edition, that the Senate was originally, in strictness, an assembly of the elders of the Gentes (Geschlechtsältesten). The paragraph upon the Senate is recast into four, and expanded from two pages to five. The special point made here upon which much of the subsequent argument hinges is the distinction between the Powers (Befugnisse or Competenz) of the Senate, and its merely advisory functions. The Powers are twofold, — first, in case of an interregnum, the supreme authority at once reverted to the Senate, as the possessors of the auspices and the imperium, and thus the source of all delegated power; second, the Senate possessed the power of declaring null any act of the assembly on constitutional or religious grounds. The Senate thus stood towards the assembly, not as an upper house, but as exercising a kind of Nomophylakie, as he calls it; "and could only annul in case the assembly had overstepped its powers." Only one other point in the constitution of the monarchy needs to be mentioned. The former edition (p. 81) held to the common view, that the Sex Suffragia contained exclusively patricians; it is maintained now, that all eighteen centuries of Equites were thrown open to patricians and plebeians alike, that is (and this is the important point), that, under the centuriate organization of Servius Tullius, there was, from the first, absolutely no distinction between the orders.

Passing now to the Second Book, the times of the republic, — we find what we may fairly call a revolution in opinions. As to the Senate, it has heretofore been Mommsen's view, that patricians and plebeians were admitted alike to it from the beginning of the republic, and even earlier; a view, which, although quite opposed to the accepted doctrine, succeeded in answering some perplexing questions, at the same time leaving some others, equally perplexing, unanswered. He now advances a doctrine (p. 235) which appears to satisfy all the requirements of the problem, and to agree with the statements of the ancient writers as nearly as is perhaps possible in the confused state of our information. "The previously existing College of the

* Römische Forschungen von TH. MOMMSEN. Erster Band. veränderte Auflage. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. 1864.

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Elders [Senate] not only remained exclusively patrician, but preserved also its essential functions, the right of appointing an Interrex, and of accepting or rejecting, as constitutional or unconstitutional, the decrees passed by the assembly." But with regard to the Senate in its other capacity, as council, with only advisory powers, —“the regulation was made, that, for such transactions, a number of non-patrician Zugeschriebener (conscripti) should be added to the patrician Senate (patres)." These conscripti were not senators; they ranked only as Equites: they had no power of speaking, but only of voting (pedibus in sententiam ire, hence called pedarii); but it is "from this giving of counsel, rather than from the previously described special functions (Competenz), that the later high powers of the Senate were developed." It was this enlarged Senate, therefore, not the patrician one, that became the ruling power in the State.

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In this way, the patricians maintained the ascendency of their order; for this exclusively patrician body - the patres-was the fountain of all religious and political power. But, at the same time that plebeians were admitted to the advisory Senate, they were admitted also, our author maintains, to the curiæ, and voted in the Comitia Curiata as well as the Centuriata, a view which flies directly in the face of all received opinions, but which is quite consistent with the statements of the ancients. There was, he argues at some length in the Forschungen, no such thing as a patrician special assembly (Sonderversammlung) under the Republic. The patriciate had become a close aristocracy, small in numbers, never enlarged under the Republic,and represented only by its special Senate. It is, indeed, in the reduced numbers of this oligarchy that we find the motive for admitting the plebeians en masse to the citizenship. "An enlargement of the community (Gemeinde) was unavoidable; and it followed in the most comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the entire body of the plebeians — that is, all who were not citizens, but, at the same time, were neither slaves nor resident citizens of foreign communities were received

into the Curia" (p. 234).

We find nothing more in the first chapter of the second book, except the development, in detail, of the views already stated, and a fuller and more careful analysis of the nature of the constitutional change from monarchy to republic. In the second chapter, the special plebeian assemblies are discussed. The first question that arises is the much mooted one, In what assembly were the tribunes chosen before the Publilian Law? Mommsen answered, in the earlier editions,

"The consuls were necessarily patricians, chosen by the essentially plebeian centuries; the tribunes, necessarily plebeians, chosen by the patrician curiæ;" in this holding with Cicero and Dionysius, against the majority of modern writers. Now, however, having adopted the view that the plebeians were admitted to the curiæ, he maintains that the tribunes were chosen "by the plebeians assembled according to curiæ;" that is, believing no longer in patrician Comitia Curiata, he believes in a plebeian concilium curiatum by the side of the regular comitia, which contained both orders. This plebeian Sonderversammlung by curia was, however, short-lived: the Publilian Law of 471 transferred the election of tribunes, and all other plebeian concerns, to a new plebeian assembly, organized according to tribes.

The discussion of the Publilian Law is one of the most striking of the new portions of the work. "It was," he says, 66 one of the most fruitful in consequences which Roman History knows." Livy (ii. 56) says of the Publilian Law, that it "took away from the patricians the power of creating whatever tribunes they chose by the votes of their clients," an important statement, which has never before, we believe, received any satisfactory explanation. The object of the reform, Mommsen states as follows: "In these divisions [the local tribes], which rested throughout on the ownership of land, only the landowners (ansässigen Leute) voted." The city rabble (turba forensis), who were wholly under the dominion of their rich patrons, were therefore excluded, and the plebs constituted as a middle-class landed aristocracy. With the Publilian Law, the conflict of the orders acquires more intensity. . . . The plebeian opposition rested peculiarly upon the well-to-do (besitzenden) middle class. From the moment in which the proletaires (nicht ansässigen Leute) were removed from its assembly, it was organized, and began to develop its political power " (Forschungen, p. 187). Connected with this view is that of the Plebs as originally a Collegium or voluntary association of individuals (do., p. 179); and of the criminal jurisdiction exercised by its officers (tribunes and ædiles) as "a regulated lynch law," necessary for selfpreservation. This quasi-aristocratic character, however, the Assembly of the tribes preserved only until the censorship of Appius Claudius the Blind (A.D. 312), who admitted all citizens, including the freedmen, to the tribes (do., p. 154). Earlier than this, however, it was found convenient to establish new comitia of the tribes, for the whole body of citizens, patrician and plebeian; and these comitia tributa, as well as the concilium tributum plebis, or Sonderversammlung of the plebeians by

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tribes, with which they are often confounded, continued in existence through the Republic. The distinction should be carefully observed (do., p. 156) between populus (the whole people) and plebs; comitia (an assembly of the whole people) and concilium (an assembly of the plebs or any other portion of the people); lex (a law passed in comitia) and scitum (one passed in a concilium). It may be added, in this connection, that, of the three apparently identical laws which defined the powers of the assembly by tribes, Professor Mommsen is of opinion that the Lex Valeria-Horatia (449) and the Lex Publilia (339) had reference to the comitia tributa; the Lex Hortensia (287), to the plebeian assembly.

Only one other point seems to require mention, the discussion in chap. ii. of the political bearings of the decemviral legislation. In the old edition, the overthrow of the decemvirs and the restoration of the tribunate was represented as the work of the plebeian leaders (p. 259). In the new edition, the decemvirate is represented as, “after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the tribunate, the third great victory of the plebs; and the bitterness of the opposite party [from whose pen we have the story] against the institution, as well as against its head, Appius Claudius, is explicable enough. The plebeians had by it gained the right of being chosen to the highest office in the community, and a common law for the country (gemeine Landrecht); and it was not they who had reason to rise against the new magistracy, and, by the force of arms, restore the purely patrician consular rule. This object can have been pursued only by the party of the nobility."

It is impossible, in these few pages, to give more than an outline of the views presented in the new edition of the History, and the accompanying Forschungen. It is too much to claim that the disputed points will now be considered as settled. Many of them still appear very doubtful. They will, however, carry weight with them as a whole, not only in virtue of their own consistency with testimony and internal coherence, but also as the matured views of by far the ablest man, most thorough scholar, and profoundest thinker, that is laboring in this field of investigation.

THE volumes of Samuel Adams's Life are an important contri

* The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams: being a Narrative of his Acts and Opinions and of his Agency in Producing and Forwarding the Ameri

bution to American history. They fill one of the few remaining gaps in the precious collection of original materials through which we are brought into presence of the actors and the events of our Revolutionary struggle, and little more is now needed to complete our knowledge of that period. At home we have had well-written lives and carefully prepared editions of the writings of Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Otis, Gerry, Ames, and many others; and we only await the publication of the longpromised lives of Timothy Pickering and Nathanael Greene: in England, the family archives of nearly every politician of note have been laid open to public inspection; and the remaining correspondence of George III. and Lord North is announced as in press: in France, the important work of Louis de Loménie on Beaumarchais and his Time, and the instructive essay of DeWitt on Jefferson, with its appendix of documents relative to Citizen Genet, have thrown new and unexpected light on some obscure transactions. Among these numerous works, the volumes before us are not the least valuable. More than half a century ago, the late Samuel Adams Wells undertook to write the life of his distinguished ancestor; but death arrested the progress of his work when he had brought down the narrative to the year 1777. After the death of Mr. Wells, the materials which had come into his possession, together with his manuscript life, were placed at the disposal of Mr. Bancroft, who has made good use of them in his later volumes. Many of the most important papers, however, had been lost or destroyed through the carelessness of irresponsible persons; but enough still remained to form a body of original materials of the utmost importance to the historian and the biographer.

Inspired with a natural desire to complete the labor which his kinsman had left unfinished, Mr. William V. Wells applied to Mr. Bancroft for the use of the materials in his possession, and set himself to work to gather from other sources every accessible fact and document. In the volumes before us, we have the fruits of many years of conscientious study of his theme; and, in every part of the work, there is abundant evidence of his careful and diligent research. He has made a copious and judicious selection from Adams's manuscripts and printed papers, and has connected his extracts by a narrative, which, if not always polished and vigorous, is uniformly full, clear, and minute.

can Revolution. With Extracts from his Correspondence, State Papers, and Political Essays. By WILLIAM V. WELLS. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1866. 3 vols. 8vo.