Look, for example, at two of the most successful oligarchies of history--ancient Sparta and mediæval Venice. Sparta was, as Bulwer justly observes in his “Rise and Fall of Athens,” a “machine wound up by the tyranny of a fixed principle, which did not permit it even to dine as it pleased; its children were not its own--itself had no property in self. So it flourished and decayed, bequeathing to fame men only noted for hardy valor, fanatical patriotism, and profound but dishonorable craft--attracting, indeed, the wonder of the world, but advancing no claim to its gratitude and contributing no single addition to its intellectual stores.” Such was the state that was ruled by the privileged “caste” of the Spartans and its administrative committee, the Ephoræ--a state remembered only for its brief military supremacy over her Grecian neighbors. Contrast her with one of those neighbors--Athens, the most typical and the most democratic of ancient democracies.[4] “The people of Athens,” says Bulwer, “were not, as in Sparta, the tools of the state--they were the state! In Athens the true blessing of freedom was rightly placed in the opinions and the soul. This unshackled liberty had its convulsions and its excesses, but it produced masterly philosophy, sublime poetry, and accomplished art with the energy and splendor of unexampled intelligence. Looking round us, more than four and twenty centuries after, in the establishment of the American Constitution, we yet behold the imperishable blessings which we derive from the liberties of Athens. Her life became extinct, but her soul transfused itself, immortal and immortalizing, throughout the world.” Venice was another such oligarchy as Sparta--ruled by a small patrician “caste,” who chose an all-powerful Senate from their own number; and from the Senate was selected an Executive Council of Three--a name that has become proverbial for a body of secret and irresponsible tyrants. Venice’s strength was in commerce, in finance, as Sparta’s was in war. Her rich trade with the East and West made her seem The pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.[5] But her internal government was one long reign of terror. The Council of Three met at night, masked and robed in scarlet cloaks, to judge those against whom accusations had been thrust into the yawning “Lions’ Mouths”--two slots in the wall into which any might thrust an anonymous denunciation of his enemy. And from the Council’s sentence there was no hope of appeal; its victims were hurried across the Bridge of Sighs to vanish forever from human sight in the awful torture chambers to which that melancholy passage led.