The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives
of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed
with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were
established throughout the empire.
The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity
of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its
including in the state only a particular class of the territorial
people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different
degrees of servitude. It recognized and sustained a privileged
class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian
aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order,
it held all outside of it to be less than men and without
political rights. Practically, power was an attribute of birth
and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among
freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by
orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the
order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election
over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in
the hands of the rich and noble few.
The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the
sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts
the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to
defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality.
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