For these things are generally done in the manner of a battle: parties get heated; the blood is up; first ink is shed in oceans, then gall, then blood; and who expects moderation from men with partisan pens or poignards in their hands, and carrying on a systematic trade in all sorts of misrepresentation, slander, and lies? We read sometimes, indeed, of a whole people having by a happy accident found out their wisest man--as in the notable example of SOLON--and oligarchs and democrats voluntarily submitting themselves to {168} him as a just and legal arbiter. The result in this case, as we read, was what might have been expected. The wise man produced a wise constitution. The contending claims of the adverse parties were adjusted with moderation; and a mingled polity, presenting a just medium between oligarchy, the cold selfishness of the few, and democracy, the overbearing insolence of the many, was the result. But nothing human is permanent; and the next changes did not proceed so comfortably. The democracy, inflated with their military successes at Marathon and Salamis, would tolerate no check; their Areopagus, or House of Lords, was shorn of all influence; the extravagant ambition of their popular assemblies was fooled to the top of its bent by the unprincipled brilliancy of adventurers like Alcibiades; the constant necessity of maintaining political influence by flinging sops to a greedy multitude produced, as we see in America at the present hour, a corruption of public morals, and a deterioration of the character of public men, against which all patriotic remonstrances were weak: faction assumed the helm; venality became law; and at the moment of danger, when the young Macedonian snake might yet have been crushed, there was found only one honest man among the noisy haranguers of the Pnyx. And to him they listened only when it was too late. Thus, by the excess of democratic polity fostered by Pericles, the insolence of democratic ambition spurred by Alcibiades, the languor that followed the over-exertion of the Peloponnesian War, and the corruption that belongs to every extreme form of government, Athens forfeited her short lease of brilliant liberty, and became a slave for more than two thousand years. A similar scene {169} was exhibited in the Roman Forum, which, however, I must refrain from painting out in detail here. Suffice it to say that, so long as a moderate balance between patricians and plebeians was maintained, the Aristocratic Republic of Rome prospered at home and conquered abroad; but no sooner had the democracy, by the Hortensian law of B.C. 286, asserted the right of acting alone in legislative measures, without the co-operation of the Roman House of Lords (that is, the Senate), than the seed of destruction was sown. The two parties were now planted face to face on independent ground; two masters in the same house claimed equal power; the peaceful balance became a battle-field; assassinations in the