I Have traced the history of the wars which followed the restoration of the city, down to the interval of peace occasioned by the necessity of settling the new constitution of the commonwealth after the passing of the Licinian laws: the bulk of this volume will not allow me to carry down the internal history beyond the epoch at which those laws were first brought forward.

The ferment which produced them did not arise, like the commotions which led to the Publilian laws, and to the appointment of the decemvirs, from the pretensions of the higher class of the plebeians to more freedom and a due share of civil offices, but from the misery which the Gallic invasion left behind it. Revolutions which are brought on by general distress, in attempting to remedy it, usually destroy the foundations of a permanent free constitution, and, after horrible convulsions, have almost always ended in despotism: it is the noblest glory of the Roman people, a glory in which no other can vie with it, that twice in its history such an excitement gave rise to a higher and more durable state of legal freedom. That which elsewhere was a deathblow to liberty, was at Rome a cure for the internal disorders of the republic, and raised its constitution to that state, which, considering the perishableness of everything human, is perhaps, like a similar stage in our individual happiness, the most desirable of all: it stopt only one step short of that perfection, after which every further change is an inroad of corruption and decay, even though it may be long unacknowledged as such, nay regarded as an advance and an improvement.