M. de Champagny gives it as his deliberate opinion that the Roman Empire, during the first two centuries, is to be regarded as 'a federation of free nations under an absolute monarch.' He has a most interesting chapter ('Antonines,' book iv. ch. 11) on the liberties of the Roman Empire, in which he especially compares them with those of the nations of modern Europe. It was published under the reign of Louis Philippe, and is doubly interesting to English readers, both for the contrast which it establishes between the Roman Empire and the most free Continental States; and also because it throws much undesigned light upon the immense difference between the meaning attached to the word liberty in France and in England. He deliberately declares, and, we think, proves, that a subject had much greater personal freedom under the Antonines than under any of the most free Continental kingdoms. Of political liberty, he says the moderns have much more--the free press, the right of voting, the tribune (_i.e._, the power of addressing a public legislative assembly), charters, constitutions, _habeas corpus_.
'And yet I venture to doubt whether Europe in the nineteenth century, at the present moment, is much more free than the ancient world, even under the Roman Empire (of course I do not include the slaves).... We, the proud citizens of a Parliamentary monarchy, who have made revolutions when we were called _subjects_--subjects nevertheless we were and still are, every day of our lives. We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or to dine more than twenty together; or to have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or to lend a book to a friend; or to put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in a street; or to kill a partridge, or to plant a tree near a roadside; or to dig coal out of our own land; or to teach three or four children to read; or to gather our neighbours for prayer; or to have an oratory in our house (what is it that constitutes an oratory?); or to bleed a sick man; or to sell him a medicine; or (in some countries) to be married; or to do any one of a thousand other things, which it would fill volumes to enumerate; without permission from the Government, which permission, we are carefully told, is always, and in its very nature, subject to be recalled. In three cases out of four, indeed, the Government does not either authorise or forbid; it tolerates. We live by toleration. We are born, we have a home, a family, we bring up our children, we have a God, we have a religion, all by the indulgent and merciful, but always revocable, toleration of the ruling power. Of all things that man does there is only one over which the Government has no authority. We are allowed to die without its permission. Still, we do need it in order to allow us to be buried. At certain moments we have sovereign power over great and public matters, but in small matters of private life we are subjects, nay, inferior to subjects. Unluckily, these small matters make up our life, and these private matters are just the things important in life.'--('Antonines,' vol. ii. 182.)
