It may be taken as a governing principle, in all civil relations, that
the strong will grow stronger and the feeble more weak, until the first
become unfit to rule or the last unable to endure. In this important
truth is contained the secret of the downfall of all those states which
have crumbled beneath the weight of their own abuses. It teaches the
necessity of widening the foundations of society until the base shall
have a breadth capable of securing the just representation of every
interest, without which the social machine is liable to interruption
from its own movement, and eventually to destruction from its own
excesses.
Venice, though ambitious and tenacious of the name of a republic, was,
in truth, a narrow, a vulgar, and an exceedingly heartless oligarchy. To
the former title she had no other claim than her denial of the naked
principle already mentioned, while her practice is liable to the
reproach of the two latter, in the unmanly and narrow character of its
exclusion, in every act of her foreign policy, and in every measure of
her internal police. An aristocracy must ever want the high personal
feeling which often tempers despotism by the qualities of the chief or
the generous and human impulses of a popular rule. It has the merit of
substituting things for men, it is true, but unhappily it substitutes
the things of a few men for those of the whole. It partakes, and it
always has partaken, though necessarily tempered by circumstances and
the opinions of different ages, of the selfishness of all corporations
in which the responsibility of the individual, while his acts are
professedly submitted to the temporizing expedients of a collective
interest, is lost in the subdivision of numbers.
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