Dionysius of Halicarnassus,* as a singular instance of daring, though if we knew all the circumstances, perhaps, we should see less cause to wonder at it. Upon the whole, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be, that in merely speculative matters, a sufficient freedom of thought was tolerated by the people-but that, in every thing that related to the administration of affairs, it was necessary to approach them with extreme caution; except in the license of the stage, where Demus excused any thing for wit. A striking instance of the former is found in the writings of these very political philosophers. Their whole history abounds in examples of the latter. Still, as all might hope to lead in the popular assembly, this sort of despotism did not degrade the understandings, however it may have perverted the morals of the citizens.

But as an unmitigated democracy was considered by the ancient writers as the worst form of government, so they extolled a well-balanced republic as the best. Aristotle calls the latter a polity xar' soxv.t Plato, in one of his works, describes the mixed government which he prefers. It corresponds singularly with our own in many important characteristics. It would appear, however, that, provided there were real checks in a constitution that is to say, opposing and equally balanced interests, they were not very curious about the form or name of the government. They thought with Rousseau-"I call every state a republic which is governed by laws, under whatever form of administration it may be-for there only the public interest governs, et la chose publique est quelque chose. Every government of laws is republican."; Plato says so expressly in the dialogue "De Republica." The same inference is deducible from the constitutions which are pointed out by all these writers as the best in practice. These were the Spartan, the Cretan, the Carthaginian, and (by Polybius and Cicero) the Roman. The only point in which all these governments coincided was that, while the democratic spirit was strong enough to give vigor and animation to the whole system, it was too much repressed and controlled to do any mischief. It must be owned, however, that they were all of a more oligarchical, or, at least, aristocratic character, than we approve. Thus Cicero praises the wisdom of Servius Tellus for having attained that quod semper in republicâ tenendum est, ne plurimum valeant plurimi.

This leads us to the second point, in which the political philosophers of antiquity generally concur. They were, as we have

*Jud. de Isocr. x. n.

+ Pol. 1. iii. c. 5. 1. iv. c. 8., &c. 7. See also Plato de Legib. 1. iii., &c. De Legib. 1. vi.

§ Contrat-Social, ii. 6.

Aristotle characterizes representative governments, however, as aristocratic. Pol. 1. iv. c. 14.

said, rather more inclined to aristocracy, or more properly speaking, to oligarchy, than to popular goverment. Harrington, who learned his republicanism in a good degree from these doctors, expresses their universal sentiment in a passage, in which he declares, that "there is something, first in the making of a commonwealth, then in the governing of it, and, last of all, in the leading of its armies, which (though there be great divines, great lawyers, great men in all professions) seems to be peculiar only to the genius of a gentleman: for it is plain, in the universal series of a story, that if any man founded a commonwealth he was first a gentleman ;" as he takes good care to add that Oliver Cromwell was. And, in another place, he does not scruple to make "that victorious captain and incomparable patriot, Olphaus Megaletor say, in reference to the constitution of Oceana, "I will stand no more to the judgment of lawyers and divines in this work, than to that of so many other tradesmen." Thus Plato and Aristotle both consider what is called in Greek, Cavavoia, that is, the exercise of any mechanic art, as altogether inconsistent with the character of a freeman and a good citizen.* A curious instance of this same prejudice, which shows how deeply rooted it was in the whole system of ancient manners and opinions, is furnished by Philostratus in his Life of Isocrates. It had been whispered that the veteran rhetorician was originally a flutemaker (aλoods). But that, says his biographer, is clearly false, for he had a statute erected to him at Olympia, which could not be, had he ever been engaged in any illiberal vocation. They did not, however, confine the objection to the more humble trades. Every profession, of which the object is to make money, was regarded as illiberal-their word for ungentlemanlike. Thus, merchants were proscribed by Plato. There was an exception (in Greece) in favor of those who excelled in the arts of imagination and taste. Actors, for instance, were very often entrusted with the highest offices of the government. They thought no occupation degrading, of which the end was to imitate la belle nature, and to which of course, a profound study of beauty, grace and excellence was necessary. These opinions may be considered as the great vice of antiquity, and one among other causes of the superiority of modern institutions that is to say, where feudal principles and notions have been exploded. What would Harrington have thought of our first Congress-of that truly Roman Senate, which declared our independence, and which carried us through the war of the Revolution? To speak disparagingly of professional men and tradesmen, as the founders of a commonwealth, in the country of Henry and Rutledge, of Franklin and Sherman, of Laurens and Morris, would be to advance a paradox not worth the pains of

* Plato de Legib. I. v. Aristot. Polit. l. vii. c. 9. Cic. Off. 1. i.

refutation. The best form of government is undoubtedly that in which all the interests of society are fairly represented; the best for efficiency, for freedom, for happiness. The various classes of society operate as checks and correctives of one another profound learning and speculative genius are tempered by the shrewd common sense and "sage experience" of men of business-and the soundest and healthiest part of every community, (where extraordinary causes have not produced a different result) the great middle class of moral, substantial people, below ambition, above a bribe, too virtuous to do wrong wilfully, too wise to be easily imposed upon, is felt in every department of the public administration. A representative government, founded upon such principles, and taking care to provide for the moral education of the people, is the only scheme which holds out any hope of rational and permanent liberty. As for the effects of oligarchical institutions upon the character and destinies of a people, they may be read in every page of Roman history from the æra of this dialogue to the battle of Philippi. Sallust, especially, draws a terrible picture of them in his history of Cataline's conspiracy-which was emphatically a plot of gentlemen-of bankrupt patricians and traitorous magistrates. Clodius, too, was as good a gentleman as any at Rome, and frequently sneers at Cicero as an upstart man of Arpinum. This view of the subject was taken by that writer, who, of all the ancients, seems to have had the justest and most comprehensive ideas of the social condition of mankind. Aristotle has a dissertation expressly to shew that the whole people, (under a well balanced polity, of course,) are necessarily better judges of every matter, whether of reasoning or of taste, whether in government, in morals, or in art. than even the best educated and most highly gifted individual can pretend to be. His Demus is a man with a vast multitude of organs, senses and faculties-a sort of male Pandora, in whose composition all kinds of men, all orders of society, have been laid under contribution for perfections.* Macchiavelli probably had this part of Aristotle's work in view, when he wrote the chapter in his Discourses, of which the title is "Che la Moltitudine è più savia e più costante che un principe" and which presents a noble and powerful defence of popular government.

We will add another remark of some importance in this connection. The idea of liberty among the ancients was very different from that which we attach to the word. This difference, as well as the aristocratic sentiments adverted to just now, sprung undoubtedly out of the institution of domestic slavery, and that principle of their jus gentium, which doomed captives in battle to perpetual bondage. From whatever causes, the Ionian and Do

* Lib. iii. c. 7. Plato, contrà.

rian races-but especially the former-attained to a remarkable superiority over the rest of mankind. In the neighbourhood of despotisms, they established popular and limited governments; in the midst of darkness and ignorance, they cultivated philosophy and the arts which body forth ideal beauty, while the hosts of the Mede sunk beneath their prowess in the field. The other great race, with whose institutions and modes of thought we are made familiar by our early studies, without excelling as much in merely intellectual pursuits, carried the preeminence which civilization gives in war and in policy, to a still higher pitch. "Their empire comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind," and kings and tetrachs were glad to become their clients and retainers. That these privileged and illustrious races should be conscious of their unquestionable advantages-that they should look down upon the rest of mankind with an insolent sense of their own superiority, and should even be unwilling to acknowledge themselves of the same origin and species, is not much to be wondered at at least, may readily be conceived. Accordingly, their whole literature breathes this spirit. It is taken for granted, by their orators, in harangues, of which this opinion inspires the eloquence-by their philosophers who built their systems and theories upon it--that Greeks were created to conquer and to control barbarians. Aristotle, in a grave inquiry, whether slavery be consistent with the law of nature, decides that it is so where one race is by nature inferior to another, and even justifies war, if it be necessary to subject the predestinated bondman to his chains.* In that famous burst of eloquence in which Cicero gives vent to his indignation and horror against Verres for the crucifixion of Gavius, it is evident that he lays the whole emphasis upon the circumstance of his being a Roman citizen, and that this circumstance entitles the offence, in the orator's estimation, to cap the whole climax of crimes and atrocities which he had to unfold, enormous as they were. His language is a precise expression of the sentiments which we impute to the ancients upon this subject. O noinen dulce libertatis! O sweet name of liberty-but what liberty? This question is answered by the next words. O jus eximium nostræ civitatis. It was not the violence done to the principles of natural right and justice-it was not that an innocent man had been punished, or that a guilty man had been cruelly tortured and disgraced: it was that the Portian and Sempronian laws had been broken-that the sacred privilege of citizenship had been despised-that a ROMAN had suffered as if he had been a Sicilian or a barbarian.† The feel

This curious passage which classes the conquest of these natural slaves with the hunting of wild beasts, is to be found. Pol. Lib. i. c. 5.

+ Justinian darkly hints that slavery is against the law of nature, though agreea

ing expressed by the orator is precisely such as one feudal baron would have experienced at witnessing the body of another gibbeted by the king's justice in eyre. Liberty, in short, was rank and nobility among the ancients; and inspired the same sentiments for good and for evil. It was considered as the birthrightthe hereditary dignity of certain races-but the idea that it was part and parcel of the law of nature and nations that it was due in common justice to all mankind, seems to have occurred to very few, and to have been acted upon by nobody.* This accounts for that fierce and jealous love of liberty which characterized the Athenian democracy, and (whatever may have been its other effects) gives such a noble spirit and such lively interest to their whole literature.

Cicero, as we have said, thought that he saw in the constitution of his country, as it existed during the happy and glorious period before alluded to, the best of all possible schemes of government a perfect model of the well-tempered and balanced polity, imagined by philosophers in their visions of perfectibility, but never successfully reduced to practice by any other great people. He was willing to take it with all its imperfections on its head with all its apparent anomalies, irregularities and defects. Its fruits had been good, and that was enough for him. The imperium in imperio, the plebiscitum, and the veto, which a systematic politician, working by plumb and rule, would have condemned as an absurdity, struck him as the best balance that could be devised. He was not alarmed at the power, or even the necessity, of resorting now and then to the despotism of the dictator, or the decree of ne quid respublica detrimenti capiat, which, in more recent times, was substituted for it in practice. He regarded these very irregularities as among the chief excellences of the government in an uncorrupted age. They were a proof that it had not been formed upon visionary and superficial principles, without reference to the wants, the habits, or the character of the people. He had not the presumption to suppose that he could devise a priori a scheme of polity better than that which had been so fruitful of good for centuries together. He had no faith in political metaphysics. He knew that nothing was more deceptive and dangerous than the affectation of mathematical exactness in matters which have less to do with quantity than with any other of the ten categories. He had never heard of the three bases of the philosophical constitution of France-of the basis of population, the basis of contribution, or the basis of territory; and the rest of that magnificent but senseless jargon. It did not occur to him that (as the specuble to the jus gentium. Inst. Lib. i. tit.-and Socrates says something to the same purpose, but with some qualification. Xenoph. Mem. Lib iv. c. 2.

* Hoc teneo, hic hæreo, judices, hoc sum contentus uno, &c.