It may not be possible to bring it under any philosophical theory, and it bore but a small resemblance to Plato’s ideal State; but it had the merit of being the most practical plan ever tested for maintaining the balance between public and private forces, public welfare and private wealth, national dignity and individual social importance. Of the three great conspiracies only one was the work of an ambitious aristocrat; another was a disappointed rich burgher’s ineffectual effort at revenge; the third was headed by the Doge himself, partly out of private resentment. None of them had any great chance of success, yet so great was the apprehension they created that they were the source and origin of all that terrible machinery of secret tribunals, spies, anonymous accusations, and private executions which darken the later history of Venice; a machinery which was almost always at work against the very nobles who had constructed it, who feared it, but who never even thought of doing away with it, though they could have voted it out of existence at any meeting of their council; a machinery which hardly affected the masses of the people at all, and which powerfully protected the merchant burghers, but at the mere mention of which the greatest noble became silent and looked grave. Elsewhere in Italy the nobles of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, iron-clad, hard-riding, and hard-hitting, were the natural enemies of the people, whom they could kill like flies when they liked. In sea-girt Venice they wore no armour, the people mostly loved them, and the burghers needed their protection and shared in all the sources of their wealth. The nobles’ only possible enemies at home were among themselves. [Sidenote: _Rom. iii. 5._] History has not left a very clear account of the conspiracy of Marin Bocconio against the aristocratic Republic in 1300. We know that he was a man who had a great following, chiefly on account of his immense wealth, and Romanin remarks that his intelligence was not equal to the arduous undertaking he had planned. We know that on the discovery of the plot he was taken, that he was first confined in the prison of the ducal palace, and afterwards hanged with ten of his principal accomplices between the two columns, probably those of the Piazzetta, and we have a list of those executed, showing that none of them were noble; but a few noble names appear among those of persons exiled as having been favourable to a revolution. Bocconio was certainly one of those malcontents who were not satisfied with the position and privileges of a [Illustration: RIO JENA SECONDA] Venetian burgher, and he was desirous of opening himself a way into the Great Council by means of his fortune. The story that he knocked at the door of the council chamber with the hilt of his sword, and armed to the teeth, is an empty fable. He plotted, like the other conspirators, in the dark, and he was betrayed by an accomplice.