The monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly rooted they may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability, seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the following:--(1) The original motive for creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of peace will cease to operate, and the instinct of individual liberty, which belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will revive, and cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with disfavour. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the ἄριστοι, or natural aristocracy, whose individual importance must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne. The natural tendency will be to follow the example of succession in private families, and recognise the right of the son to walk into the public heritage of his father; but the additional influence thus given to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective principle is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of a competition for power, will be increased; and this factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in subjection to some foreign power; or, lastly, they will dispense with the kingship altogether, and return to their original mixture of aristocracy and democracy with more firmly-defined functions and more reliable guarantees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the possession of absolute power; the sacredness of personal property and the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab of the day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, an independent, a self-reliant, and a self-governing people.