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Boulder Place Directory 20
Page 10
The Centuries formed the new National Assembly. They mustered as an army in the Campus Martius, or the Field of Mars, on the banks of the Tiber, outside the city. They voted by Centuries, and were hence called the _Comitia Centuriata_. Each Century counted as one vote, but did not consist of the same number of men. On the contrary, in order to give the preponderance to wealth, the first or richest class contained a far greater number of Centuries than any of the other classes (as will be seen from the table below), although they must at the same time have included a much smaller number of men. The Equites and First Class alone amounted to 100 Centuries, or more than half of the total number; so that, if they agreed to vote the same way, they possessed at once an absolute majority. An advantage was also given to age; for the Seniores, though possessing an equal number of votes, must of course have been very inferior in number to the Juniores.
In the history of constitutional liberty, of which the Great Charter is the beginning, its specific provisions are of far less importance than its underlying principle. What we to-day consider the great safeguards of Anglo-Saxon liberty are all conspicuously absent from the first of its creative statutes, nor could any of them have been explained in the meaning we give them to the understanding of the men who framed the charter. Consent to taxation in the modern sense is not there; neither taxation nor consent. Trial by jury is not there in that form of it which became a check on arbitrary power, nor is it referred to at all in the clause which has been said to embody it. Parliament, habeas corpus, bail, the independence of the judiciary, are all of later growth, or existed only in rudimentary form. Nor can the charter be properly called a contract between king and nation. The idea of the nation, as we now hold it, was still in the future, to be called into existence by the circumstances of the next reign. The idea of contract certainly pervades the document, but only as the expression of the always existent contract between the suzerain and his vassals which was the foundation of all feudal law. On the other hand, some of the provisions of our civil liberty, mainly in the interest of individual rights, are plainly present. That private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation, that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted nor excessive fines be imposed, that justice shall be free and fair to all, these may be found almost in modern form.
We found that day a palm with a bunch of small nuts which Benedicto called _coco do matto_; he said they were delicious to eat, so we proceeded to cut down the tall palm tree. When we came to split open the small _cocos_ our disappointment was great, for they merely contained water. There was nothing whatever to eat inside the hard shells. We spent some two hours that evening cracking the _cocos_--some two hundred of them--each nut about the size of a cherry. They were extremely hard to crack, and our expectant eyes were disappointed two hundred times in succession as we opened every one and found nothing whatever to eat in them.
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