For how frequently do we find their best and ablest citizens imprisoned or sentenced to banishment by the ostracism, in honour of whom the same people had just before erected statues:[63] nay not unfrequently raising statues to the memory of those illustrious and innocent men, whom they had illegally doomed to death in the wantonness of their power;[64] at once the monuments of their injustice and too late repentance! This evil was the natural consequence of that capital error in Solon’s polity, when he entrusted the supreme power to the giddy and fluctuating populace. A defect which (as I observed before) was the great leading cause of the loss of that liberty which they had so licentiously abused. For as the removal of all the honest citizens either by death or banishment paved an easy way for usurpation and tyranny; so it was a measure invariably pursued, in the democratick governments of Greece, by all those ambitious men who aimed at subverting the liberties of their country. This truth is so clearly explained, and so incontestably proved, by the great Thucydides, that whilst I peruse the annals of that admirable historian, I cannot help grieving over the tragick pages stained with the blood of so many patriot citizens, who fell a sacrifice to the dire ambition and avarice of faction. What a striking detail does he give us of the most calamitous situation of all the Grecian republicks during the Peloponnesian war! How does he labour for expression in his pathetick enumeration of the horrible consequences of faction, after his description of the destructive sedition at Corcyra! A contempt of all religion, the open violation of the most sacred ties and compacts; devastations, massacres, assassinations, and all the savage horrors of civil discord inflamed even to madness, are the perpetual subjects of his instructive history. Calamities of which he himself was at once an eyewitness and a most faithful recorder.