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a most perfectly balanced constitution in which not one man only, but a whole line of magistrates could alternate between the sovereign and the subject, without ever violating the dignity of the one character or the modesty of the other. No state was ever so fertile in great men as Rome, no republican state ever intrusted such uncontrolled power to individual magistrates; but all, patrician and plebeian, Fabius, Cornelius, Decius, any name but Claudius,* were all cast in the same mould, all existed but as instruments to carry out the ends of Rome: they caught their spirit from their country, not their country from them; they only did her work, and she ever remained their sovereign. Athens too has no lack of illustrious names, though even her Aristeides and her Phocion might hide themselves before the unsullied virtue of Fabius, and Valerius, and the glorious Decii; but while she denied them all legal power as magistrates, she became their subject as demagogues. Postumius, and Manlius, and Papirius subjected victorious sons and lieutenants to the fasces and the axe, but dreamed not of having Rome subservient to their will; the position of Themistocles, Pericles, and Alcibiades, to say nothing of Cleon or Hyperbolus, was one that never entered their imagination. Rome learned what Athens never did, to combine freedom and obedience, she never saw a demagogue, or needed an ostracism; and what has been her reward? the sovereignty of the world, in political dominion, for a longer time, and in a truer sense than Assyrian or Persian, or Macedonian could boast, and in moral influence for ever.

We have said that Rome needed no ostracism. Nothing can be more acute and ingenious than Mr. Grote's defence of this practice;† never have we seen a bad cause so more than plausibly, so really ably and soundly, supported. We do not deny his. main position that the ostracism was necessary for the safety of the democratic constitution, but we cannot be persuaded but that there was some radical fault at work in a constitution which required so extraordinary a safeguard. Surely something must be wrong, where it is assumed as a principle that the chief men of the state will be dangerous to its liberties, and where, notwithstanding all the precautions described by Mr. Grote, something worse than a bill of attainder is recognized as a natural course of proceeding, and the exile of Aristeides or Themistocles is staked upon the secret voting of a multitude, without any distinct charge being brought against any one, without any possibility of evidence as to his criminality being either alleged or refuted. For surely being dangerous to the existing constitution is to be deemed something criminal, at all events in the eyes of those who support it. An ostracism presupposes a crisis, a state of things in which the ordinary routine of the state is insufficient, and which requires some extraordinary *We mean no insult to the Plebeians of that name, the illustrious Marcelli. † Vol. iv. 200--17.

means to grapple with it. Now to consider such crises as a necessary phænomenon of government, and to legislate beforehand what is to be done when they occur, does really, with all due reverence for the great Cleisthenes, (for a great man he surely was,) savour somewhat of the ludicrous. It involves two absurdities, the deliberate recognition of a very imperfect state of government, for imperfect a state must be in which diseases requiring the application of a remedy like ostracism are to be naturally looked for: and the farther incongruity of laying down an ordinary rule for extraordinary cases. That power of summarily dealing with such cases, according to their circumstances, not according to a prescribed rule which may not apply to all, a power essential to a strong executive, is what Athens in consequence of her morbid anxiety about her liberties, refused to grant to any authority whatever, and was thus reduced to this cumbrous expedient of ostracism. Rome had a strong executive, and once at least owed to it her existence. At Athens, had her democracy been threatened by a Catiline, recourse would have been had to a trial of strength which might have issued in the ostracism of Cicero. And not to press so very extreme a case beyond its due bounds, Rome had in other cases her privilegia also; she had trials of political offenders before the assembled people, but it was the people gathered together with all the solemnities and responsibilities of a court of justice; they were not called upon to answer the vague question, "Is there any man whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? if so, whom?”* but had to decide upon a definite accusation against a definite person. Many corrupt motives may break through the sanctity of a judicial tribunal; still the whole nature and circumstance of such a tribunal do afford barriers which it requires a high amount of profligacy to cast down; ostracism has no barriers at all, it offers a premium for spite, vanity, caprice, and corruption. The man who had nothing to allege against Aristeides but his name of Just would not have voted for his banishment, had it come before him as a judicial question, where a corrupt or capricious decision involved the violation of every principle of honour and religion.

Explain it how we will, it is a remarkable fact, it is a phænomenon which cannot be got rid of, that no Athenian of first-rate emi

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* Grote, iv. 211. He proceeds to state that this "issue placed before him, though vague, was yet raised directly and legally had there been no ostracism, it might probably have been raised both indirectly and illegally, on the occasion of some special imputed crime of a suspected political leader, when accused before a court of justice-a perversion, involving all the mischief of the ostracism, without its protective benefits." We cannot agree to this reasoning, which is the greatest admission of the doctrine of legislation following, instead of guiding, public sentiment which we ever remember to have come across. It is nothing short of saying, that because in a judicial inquiry there will be a probability of the judges giving sentence not on the real merits of the case, but on an iniquitous question, which ought never to be asked there or elsewhere, the constitution is itself to forestal the temptation, and to put the question at another time and place.

nence in political affairs ever went through life without some legal mark of popular censure. From Miltiades to Phocion, death, bonds, or exile, were the doom of her greatest men; even Pericles, whose carcer of favour and prosperity was more uninterrupted than that of any other, had once to descend from his eminence and pay a fine. In many cases doubtless the punishment was deserved; nothing can be more unanswerable than Mr. Grote's defence of the Athenian people from the charges of fickleness and ingratitude in their treatment of Miltiades ;* Themistocles probably merited his fate; and the chequered career of Alcibiades, alternately patriot and traitor, precludes all sympathy with him. But who can believe ought against Aristeides or even Cimon? Still, in any case a dilemma exists neither of whose alternatives is over creditable to the public morality of Athens. Either the Athenian people were in the constant habit of discarding and punishing† their public men without cause, or the public men were in the constant habit of deserving such punishment. Whichever we choose, we must admit something radically wrong, either in the constitution, or the national character, or both. A system which habitually produces unprincipled and dishonest statesmen is very little preferable to one which habitually visits upright ones with chastisement. How few of the heroes of Rome in the days of her glory underwent a similar fate! They either fell in the battle-field, or went down to their graves in peace, full of years and honours. To pass by cases which belong to an earlier period, the only similar instance we remember is the banishment of the elder Africanus, a voluntary exile by which he avoided the punishment, which, if not deserved by any former acts, was at least justly incurred by his gross insult to the majesty of the people in refusing to produce his accounts.

One thing however must be said for Athens, which at once raises her above every Grecian state, and above Rome also. Nowhere else did so conspicuous a sentiment of humanity generally prevail. Demagogues often hurried the people into precipitate deeds of blood, of which they often repented, but there was never the same habitual disregard of human life which history often records in other nations. The Corcyræan sedition, the removal of the two thousand enfranchised Helots, the massacres of Marius and Sulla, the scenes of the French revolution, are events which have no parallel in any period of Athenian history. Public bloodshed and massacre there never was; private assassination was no weapon of the democracy, but only of its bitterest opponents.

* Vol. iv. 496-508.

+ We cannot consider ostracism as anything but a punishment, though not legally considered as such, nor involving any disgrace or forfeiture.

The Roman parallel to Cleisthenes is of course afforded by Licinius and Sextius; consequently the instances of Coriolanus, Spurius Cassius, Caso Quinctius, Camillus, and Marcus Manlius, do not come within the period under consideration, and belong to an imperfect state of the Roman polity.

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We will conclude with one of the ablest and best written portions of Mr. Grote's work, in which he sets forth the feelings and principles of the great democracy. After quoting the passage from Herodotus mentioned in our former number, he continues as follows:

Stronger expressions cannot be found to depict the rapid improvement wrought in the Athenian people by their new democracy. Of course this did not arise merely from suspension of previous cruelties, or better laws, or better administration: these, indeed, were essential conditions, but the active transforming cause here was, the principle and system of which such amendments formed the detail: the grand and new idea of the sovereign People, composed of free and equal citizens -or liberty and equality, to use words which so profoundly moved the French nation half a century ago. .* It was this comprehensive political idea which acted with electric effect upon the Athenians, creating within them a host of sentiments, motives, sympathies, and capacities, to which they had been strangers. Democracy in Grecian antiquity possessed the privilege, not only of kindling an carnest and unanimous attachment to the constitution in the bosoms of the citizens, but also of creating an energy of public and private action, such as could never be obtained under an oligarchy, where the utmost that could be hoped for was passive acquiescence and obedience. Mr. Burke has remarked that the mass of the people are generally very indifferent about theories of government; but such indifference (although improvements in the practical working of all governments tend to foster it) is hardly to be expected among any people who exhibit decided mental activity and spirit on other matters; and the reverse was unquestionably true, in the year 500 B.C., among the communities of ancient Greece. Theories of government were there anything but a dead letter: they were connected with emotions of the strongest as well as of the most opposite character. The theory of a permanent ruling One, for example, was

We could wish Mr. Grote had here expressed himself otherwise. We cannot believe that he really has any sympathy with the Reign of Terror, and most certainly his Athenian favourites would have had very little. Imagine Cleisthenes and Robespierre!

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a permanent ruling

What the Greeks "in the year 500 B.c." meant by One," Mr. Grote informs us elsewhere in a most instructive passage:"The conception which the Greeks formed of an unresponsible One, or of a king who could do no wrong, may be expressed in the pregnant words of Herodotus : He subverts the customs of the country: he violates women: he puts men to death without trial.' No other conception of the probable tendencies of kingship was justified either by a general knowledge of human nature, or by political experience as it stood from Solon downward: no other feeling than abhorrence could be entertained for the character so conceived: no other than a man of unprincipled ambition would ever seek to invest himself with it. Our larger political experience has taught us to modify this opinion, by showing that under the conditions of monarchy in the best governments of modern Europe the enormities described by Herodotus do not take place-and that it is possible, by means of representative constitutions acting under a certain force of manners, customs, and historical recollection, to obviate many of the mischiefs likely to flow from proclaiming the duty of peremptory obedience to an hereditary and unresponsible king, who cannot be changed without extra-constitutional force. But such larger observation was not open to Aristotle, the wisest as well as the most cautious of ancient theorists; nor if it had been open, could he have applied with assurance its lessons to the govern

universally odious: that of a ruling Few, though acquiesced in, was never positively attractive, unless either where it was associated with the maintenance of peculiar education and habits, as at Sparta, or where it presented itself as the only antithesis to democracy, the latter having by peculiar circumstances become an object of terror. But the theory of democracy was pre-eminently seductive; creating in the mass of the citizens an intense positive attachment, and disposing them to voluntary action and suffering on its behalf, such as no coercion on the part of other governments could extort. Herodotus, in his comparison of the three sorts of government, puts in the front rank of the advantages of democracy, its most splendid name and promise '-its power of enlisting the hearts of the citizens in support of their constitution, and of providing for all a common bond of union and fraternity. This is what even democracy did not always do but it was what no other government in Greece could do: a reason alone sufficient to stamp it as the best government, and presenting the greatest chance of beneficent results, for a Grecian community. Among the Athenian citizens, cer

ments of the single cities of Greece. The theory of a constitutional king, especially, as it exists in England, would have appeared to him impracticable: to establish a king who will reign without governing-in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no effect-exempt from all responsibility, without making use of the exemption-receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act, except within the bounds of a known law-surrounded with all the paraphernalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and licence with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king: the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen, but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. To Aristotle, certainly, it could not have appeared otherwise than unintelligible and impracticable: not likely even in a single case, but altogether inconceivable as a permanent system, and with all the diversities of temper inherent in the successive members of an hereditary dynasty. When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsibility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions; and their fear and hatred of him was measured by their reverence for a government of equal law and free speech, with the ascendency of which their whole hopes of security were associated,-in the democracy of Athens more perhaps than in any other part of Greece. And this feeling, as it was one of the best in the Greek mind, so it was also one of the most widely spread,-a point of unanimity highly valuable among so many points of dissension. We cannot construe or criticise it by reference to the feelings of modern Europe, still less to the very peculiar feelings of England, respecting kingship and it is the application, sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit, of this unsuitable standard, which renders Mr. Mitford's appreciation of Greek politics so often incorrect and unfair.” Vol. iii. pp. 16-19.

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One may however doubt whether the dislike of the Greeks to a king, to a Bamixes as distinguished from a Tuparvos, was altogether so strong as Mr. Grote represents it. Dr. Arnold seems to have grasped the distinction more accurately in his remarks on Dionysius of Syracuse (History of Rome, Vol. i. p. 476). Still as hereditary monarchy was, in the times to which we refer, the constitution of no purely Grecian state, Mr. Grote's remarks are practically most correct with regard to the tyrants, to whom doubtless he especially refers. At the same time he does not attach sufficient importance to the fact of the old hereditary monarchies of the heroic ages.

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