There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in
the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or
confederated municipalities. These municipalities, modelled
chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management
of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not
co-ordiinate in their own sphere with those exercised by the
Roman municipality, but subordinate and dependent. The senate
had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights
subject to its will. They were formally, or virtually,
subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the
Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of
freedom. Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies
rather than as subjects, and at first these municipal
organizations secured the progress of civilization in the
provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served
only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed
and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the
empire. So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the
burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial
edict to compel them to enter the municipal government; and it
became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free
citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal
burdens imposed.
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