"No institution has been more falsely represented and more misjudged than the Council of Ten. The profound secrecy of its deliberations, to secure which the extremest precautions were always permitted, offered so favorable a subject for invention and exaggeration that pamphleteers and romancers could but seize upon it without reserve. Doubtless this extraordinary tribunal had its dramas, since politics and reasons of State imposed on it the duty of scrutinizing the depths of the heart. Assuredly, also, it had its faults,--for although called supreme, it was not divine, and was therefore liable to err; but to believe that it was established for the calm commission of evil, rather than to prevent or correct it, is one of those extremely gross errors for which the active research into the truth of history--which in our day is zealously carried so far--endeavors to make reparation. "Was its creation the arbitrary outcome of the heated imagination of a tyrant of the school of Nero? Was it an offensive or defensive weapon invented by this tyrant in order to torment his people? Good sense proves this to have been impossible. The Council of Ten was created by the votes, the discussions, and conclusions of a numerous and intelligent Assembly; strong in its united strength; full of political instincts, which did not ignore the truth that the power which by a vote it was about {119} to establish was created to prevent the dangers which men of great ambitions on the exterior, or revolutionists in the interior, might bring to the Republic. "Was its establishment the work of a day? Would this great Council, created for two months only, have been continued by a new vote for one year, five years, ten years, and at last permanently, if the exercise of its power had not been recognized as a benefit rather than an evil? Was not this State, which in establishing this Council created a judge for itself, the best governed and most orderly which then existed in the world? What other nation then had a parliament like that of Venice? Could the sovereign exercise oppression even in his decrees? What was the Doge in the presence of the Grand Council, the lesser Council, and the Senate, other than a person with less power than the Sovereign of Great Britain to-day, who must be in accord with the will of the Parliament and the House of Lords? Moreover, it is manifest to one who seeks to know the Council of Ten from authentic sources, rather than from amusing histories without reliable knowledge, that this power was for the protection of the people against the patricians rather than against the people in favor of the patricians.