governors and the governed. This circumstance in some measure removed
all fear of the abuse of authority, and induced the Germans to permit
their chiefs[49] to decide upon matters of lesser moment, their private
differences,--for so Tacitus explains the _minores res_. These chiefs
were a sort of judges, but not legislators; nor do they appear to have
had a share in the superior branches of the executive part of
government,--the business of peace and war, and everything of a public
nature, being determined, as we have before remarked, by the whole body
of the people, according to a maxim general among the Germans, that what
concerned all ought to be handled by all. Thus were delineated the faint
and incorrect outlines of our Constitution, which has since been so
nobly fashioned and so highly finished. This fine system, says
Montesquieu, was invented in the woods; but whilst it remained in the
woods, and for a long time after, it was far from being a fine one,--no
more, indeed, than a very imperfect attempt at government, a system for
a rude and barbarous people, calculated to maintain them in their
barbarity.

The ancient state of the Germans was military: so that the orders into
which they were distributed, their subordination, their courts, and
every part of their government, must be deduced from an attention to a
military principle.

The ancient German people, as all the other Northern tribes, consisted
of freemen and slaves: the freemen professed arms, the slaves cultivated
the ground. But men were not allowed to profess arms at their own will,
nor until they were admitted to that dignity by an established order,
which at a certain age separated the boys from men. For when a young man
approached to virility,[50] he was not yet admitted as a member of the
state, which was quite military, until he had been invested with a