Chapter Two, Excerpt 2 of 3
The Power of Ideas

When a nation has experienced the conditions in which custom is proved perishable, leadership disastrous, and monarchy oppressive, reason must define the prime source of authority, to invest it with viable form. By such a sequence, Rome became a political laboratory. It does not appear that Rome was ever primitively barbaric, if the city had its inception in trade, using money, and holding land as private property; these are elements of advanced civilization.

It is said that the Spartans, being unaccustomed to money, were quickly demoralized when they abandoned their bare subsistence economy. They could not maintain the minimum of honesty in contractual relations, having been bred to communism. In any event, the feature of asylum certainly became incorporated in the Roman social and legal system; and ultimately created the special character of Roman Citizenship. Distinctively, one had to be born a Greek, but one could become a Roman.

Being already far advanced beyond custom and leadership, and aware of the incompetence of democracy, the Romans were obliged to solve the problem of government in rational terms, working with what they had. They had the family as the social unit, offset by contract law in respect of property, which made the individual the political unit.