POLITICS AT GENEVA 297 



No measure could be proposed except in the Senate, and no 

 measure could be brought before the General Assembly until it had 

 been passed both by the Senate and Great Council. The General 

 Assembly might send up remonstrances or petitions to the Councils, 

 but the Councils were not bound to take them into consideration. 

 In the terms in use, the citizens might ' represent,' but the Councils 

 could ' negative.' By the middle of the eighteenth century Geneva 

 had become an oligarchy, controlled by clerics and a group of 

 Noble Families. The General Assembly, however, still met from 

 time to time, if only to give a formal sanction to the enactments of 

 the Councils ; and its power of vetoing the Senate's nominations 

 for the chief offices of the State offered an obvious instrument for 

 the expression of the growing discontents. 



Outside the enfranchised minority here described lay the bulk 

 of the male population, who were liable to special taxation, and 

 up to 1768 were excluded from public offices, from the liberal 

 professions, and from certain trades. If born in the city they 

 were known as ' Natifs,' if newcomers, as ' Inhabitants.' It was, 

 it is true, possible for individuals of this class to acquire civic 

 rights either by service rendered to the State or by money pay- 

 ment, but after the sixteenth century the process became some- 

 what costly. In the first seventy years of the eighteenth century 

 some five hundred outsiders were thus admitted as burghers. 



Such, in outline, was the Constitution of Geneva in the latter 

 half of the eighteenth century. I have now to indicate the 

 main epochs in its historical development. 



For many centuries after Caesar Geneva had remained an 

 obscure provincial town, which won no place in the annals of the 

 later Empire. First Roman and then Burgundian, it shared in 

 the vicissitudes of those dark and troublous times until in the 

 eleventh century it was handed over by the Emperor Conrad n., 

 acting as King of Burgundy, to its Bishop, who was created a 

 Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The rule of the Prince- 

 Bishops lasted for some five hundred years until 1535 but it 

 was a perpetual struggle against first the local Counts of the 

 Genevois, and afterwards the House of Savoy. The little city- 

 state found itself surrounded by the dominions of hungry poten- 

 tates, who, but for the timely aid received from the neighbouring 

 Swiss cantons of Berne and Fribourg, would probably have 



