And just here we may pause to say that precisely the same kind of rule, and the same kind of results, would have been witnessed in this country, had the rebellion, by the aid of the Democratic party, succeeded in capturing Washington and in establishing their rule over this country. It is one of the "Secrets of the Late Rebellion, now Revealed for the First Time" (and our information comes from one who was behind the scenes and knew all about it, and the first sixteen chapters of this volume entirely confirm this opinion), that behind President Davis and behind General Lee stood a body of desperate men, who, at one single sweep, would have wiped them off the chess-board and put others in their stead, had they shown the least considerate humanity in dealing with Northern men, in case the rebellion had succeeded. Not Abraham Lincoln alone would have fallen at the hands of the assassin or hangman, but thousands of others throughout the North would have suffered a like fate, until the rule of the "thirty tyrants" in Athens would have been considered but child's play in comparison with the rule of the more than three hundred tyrants of this republic. Then would have been witnessed here, as there, thousands of the most eminent of American families leaving their country in despair--wandering they knew not whither--without a home, and without a country! Abraham Lincoln's assassination was indeed done by a half crazed Southern rebel; but who can doubt, after reading the secrets revealed in the foregoing pages, that the frenzy that fired Booth's brain, and the nerve that enabled him to fire the deadly shot, came as directly from the Democratic party, as a party, as that the pistol itself was purchased by a Democratic partisan. All these facts go hand-in-hand, and there is no separating one from the others. But we have already occupied much more of time and space on the Athenian Republic than we had intended. We can only say, in conclusion, that, after the reign of the "thirty tyrants," its fortunes were up and down--oftener down than up--until the battle of Chæronea, which occurred in the year 338 before Christ, when the liberties of Greece were made to yield finally and forever to the stronger arm of the Macedonian. The Athenian Republic had existed after a fashion--and, indeed, much of the time it was orderly "after a fashion"--for seven hundred and thirty years; and when it fell, there was not so much as an empty shell left. Its internal dissensions, more than anything else, had eaten out its vitals; the jealousy of surrounding monarchies had been to it a constant source of danger, and several times a source of great disaster; while for fully one-half of the seven hun-dren and thirty years it was rather a government of tyranny than of liberty to those who lived under it. [Illustration: 0333] CHAPTER XXI. OF SPARTA AND ITS LESSONS.