LEGISLATION

With us legislation has always been in form the act of the King, though for many centuries the co-operation of the two Houses of Parliament has been necessary and, for two centuries, the Royal veto has not been exercised so far as the English law is concerned. But, in Rome, the legislative power shifted in much more striking ways. During the Republic it was in the hands of Assemblies of the people, not representative bodies such as our House of Commons, but bodies in which all male citizens sat and voted. There were several such Assemblies and we need not here consider the vexed questions of their relations to each other and their respective competences. The different Assemblies were grouped in different ways and while the voting within each group was by head, this decided only the vote of the group, which was the effective vote in the Assembly. As might have been expected the legislative power was at first in the hands of the Assembly (comitia centuriata) in which the grouping was such that an overwhelming preponderance was given to the wealthy and noble, but passed ultimately to the Tributal Assembly, arranged on democratic lines. But the machinery was very different from that by which an Act of Parliament is produced. There was no such thing as a ‘Private Member's Bill’: every measure had to be proposed by the presiding officer, himself an elected ‘magistrate’, i.e. a high officer of State.