168 



entitled to vote only, and not to speak. Who they were, 

 and how many, it is by no means easy to say, since our chief 

 informant, A. Gellius, was completely in the dark about it 

 himself. They were certainly an inferior class, called Pedarii 

 because they pedibtcs in sententias ibant. The majority of 

 votes was ascertained by a literal division of the senators, who 

 walked into different parts of the room ; in cases of doubt the 

 two groups were counted, but generally the president simply 

 declared which seemed to him to be the majority. It is clear 

 from this that the voting was not secret, as it has been some- 

 times on the continent, but ojoen, as it has always been in this 

 country, and as it best befits men of honour and integrity. 

 The majority having been ascertained and declared the decree 

 of the Senate (Senatus consultum) .was formally recorded, and 

 a few of those senators who had chiefly supported it, put their 

 names to it as witnesses. 



Besides the points of similarity or divergence which I have 

 mentioned, there were several more which it would be inte- 

 resting to enter upon, if this would not carry us too far. The 

 vast difference for instance produced by the publicity of par- 

 liamentary transactions, caused by the admission of strangers 

 and by the public press, places the English Parliament alto- 

 gether on a different basis. The meetings of the Eoman 

 Senate were private, and the greatest secresy was observed by 

 the senators as to all that passed within. 



I have cursorily mentioned, that in the legislature the 

 Eoman Senate was far inferior in influence to the British 

 Parliament, but that on the other hand it shared in the execu- 

 tive so largely, that its weight in the political organism, if not 

 operating in the same direction as that of a British Parlia- 

 ment, was at least not inferior to it ; nay, if we consider, that 

 in an early state of society the formal enacting of laws was a 

 process of much rarer occurrence, — that the whole amount of 

 laws was prodigiously small if compared with that of later 

 periods and a more complicated and artificial state of society. 



