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Updated: May 8, 2025
But this was before the disbandment of the Waartgelders and the general change of magistracies had been effected. Earnest consultations were now held as to the possibility of devising some means of compromise; of providing that the decisions of the Synod should not be considered binding until after having been ratified by the separate states.
He then provided them with a couple of coaches and pair in which they set forth on their journey, going by way of Antwerp, Ghent, Courtray, Ryssel, to Arras, making easy stages, stopping in the middle of the day to bait, and sleeping at each of the cities thus mentioned, where they duly received the congratulatory visit and hospitalities of their respective magistracies.
He issued an edict which forbade all the other magistracies to perform their official functions until the voting on the agrarian law should be carried through; he placed his own seals on the doors of the temple of Saturn to prevent the quaestors from making payments to the treasury or withdrawing money from it; he forbade the praetors to sit in the courts of justice and announced that he would exact a fine from those who disobeyed.
It had become necessary to empower the magistracies of towns to defend themselves by enrolled troops against mob violence and against an enforced synod considered by great lawyers as unconstitutional.
It need hardly be said that the gist of this advice was to recognize the absolute death of the system of slavery, to deal with the freedmen with perfect sincerity as free laborers who were at liberty to make the best bargain they could for their labor, and to confine for the present their political activity to the duty of keeping alive such local magistracies as would prevent the community from falling into anarchy.
For they too benefited by the privileges against which the agitation was mainly directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies, when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed.
It was called the Council of Troubles, but it soon acquired the terrible name, by which it will be forever known in history, of the 'Blood-Council'. It superseded all other institutions. Every court, from those of the municipal magistracies up to the supreme councils of the provinces, were forbidden to take cognizance in future of any cause growing out of the late troubles.
The ambition of the principal men induced them to take advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate the hitherto temporary charges in their families; the people already inured to dependence, accustomed to ease and the conveniences of life, and too much enervated to break their fetters, consented to the increase of their slavery for the sake of securing their tranquillity; and it is thus that chiefs, become hereditary, contracted the habit of considering magistracies as a family estate, and themselves as proprietors of those communities, of which at first they were but mere officers; to call their fellow-citizens their slaves; to look upon them, like so many cows or sheep, as a part of their substance; and to style themselves the peers of Gods, and Kings of Kings.
The subordination of the public magistracies to the state-council, introduced by the revolution of 244; the transference of the right of summoning men to the senate from the consul to the censor; lastly, and above all, the legal recognition of the right of those who had been curule magistrates to a seat and vote in the senate, had converted the senate from a council summoned by the magistrates and in many respects dependent on them into a governing corporation virtually independent, and in a certain sense filling up its own ranks; for the two modes by which its members obtained admission election to a curule office and summoning by the censor were both virtually in the power of the governing board itself.
At first, allied to the Roman emperors from the time that Gaul became again a Roman province, the bishops succeeded by underhanded means to secure large endowments for themselves and their churches and to occupy the leading magistracies in the cities. That did not satisfy them; they counted upon being better able to dominate the barbarous Franks than the civilized Romans.
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