The Athenian Democracy was such a tumultuary government as we can scarce form a notion of in the present age of the world. The whole collective body of the people voted in every law without any limitation of property, without any distinction of rank, without control of any magistracy or senate;​[36] and consequently without regard to order, justice, or prudence. The Athenians soon became sensible of the mischiefs attending this constitution, but being averse to the checking themselves by any rule or restriction, they resolved at least to check their demagogues or counsellors by the fear of future punishment and inquiry. They accordingly instituted this remarkable law, a law esteemed so essential to their government that Æschines insists on it as a known truth, that were it abolished or neglected it were impossible for the Democracy to subsist.​[37] The people feared not any ill consequence to liberty from the authority of the criminal courts, because these were nothing but very numerous juries, chosen by lot from among the people; and they considered themselves justly as in a state of perpetual pupilage, where they had an authority, after they came to the use of reason, not only to retract and control whatever had been determined, but to punish any guardian for measures which they had embraced by his persuasion. The same law had place in Thebes, and for the same reason. It appears to have been a usual practice in Athens, on the establishment of any law esteemed very useful or popular, to prohibit for ever its abrogation and repeal. Thus the demagogue who diverted all the public revenues to the support of shows and spectacles, made it criminal so much as to move for a repeal of this law; thus Leptines moved for a law, not only to recall all the immunities formerly granted, but to deprive the people for the future of the power of granting any more; thus all bills of attainder were forbid, or laws that affected one Athenian without extending to the whole commonwealth. These absurd clauses, by which the legislature vainly attempted to bind itself for ever, proceeded from a universal sense of the levity and inconstancy of the people.