But when they see that all their actions are exposed to public view-that in consequence of the celerity with which all things become communicated, the whole nation forms, as it were, one continued irritable body, no part of which can be touched without exciting a universal tremor -they become sensible that the cause of each individual is really the cause of all, and that to attack the lowest among the people is to attack the whole people.

Here also we must remark the error of those who, as they make the liberty of the people consist in their power, so make their power consist in their action.

When the people are often called to act in their own persons, it is impossible for them to acquire any exact knowledge of the state of things. The event of one day effaces the notions which they had begun to adopt on the preceding day: and amidst the continual change of things, no settled principle, and, above all, no plans of union, have time to be established among them.-You wish to have the people love and defend their laws and liberty; leave them, therefore, the necessary time to know what laws and liberty are, and to agree in their opinion concerning them ;-you wish a union, a coalition, which cannot be obtained but by a slow and peaceable process; for bear, therefore, continually to shake the vessel.

Nay, farther, it is a contradiction, that the people should act, and at the same time retain any real power. Have they, for instance, been forced, by the weight of public op pression, to throw off the restraints of the law, from which they no longer received protection?-they presently find themselves suddenly become subject to the command of a few leaders, who are the more absolute in proportion as the nature of their power is less clearly ascertained; nay, perhaps, they must even submit to the toils of war, and to military discipline.

If it be in the common and legal course of things that the people are called to move, each individual is obliged, for the success of the measures in which he is then made to take a concern, to join himself to some party; nor can this party be without a head. The citizens thus grow di vided among themselves, and contract the pernicious habit of submitting to leaders. They are, at length, no more than the clients of a certain number of patrons; and the

latter, soon becoming able to command the arms of as, citizens in the same manner as they at first governed their í votes, make little account of a people, with one part of which they know how to curb the other.

But when the moving springs of government are placed entirely out of the body of the people, their action is thereby disengaged from all that could render it complicated, or hide it from the eye. As the people thenceforward consider things speculatively, and are, if I may be allowed the expression, only spectators of the game, they acquire just notions of things: and as these notions, amidst the general quiet, gain ground, and spread themselves far and wide, they at length entertain, on the subject of their li berty, but one opinion.

Forming thus, as it were, one body, the people, at every instant, have it in their power to strike the decisive blow, which is to level every thing. Like those mechanical powers, the greatest efficiency of which exists at the instant which precedes their entering into action, it has an immense force, just because it does not yet exert any; and in this state of stillness, but of attention, consists its true momentum.

With regard to those who (whether from personal privileges, or by virtue of a commission from the people) are intrusted with the active part of government, as they, in the mean while, see themselves exposed to public view, and observed, as from a distance, by men free from the spirit of party, and who place in them but a conditional trust, they are afraid of exciting a commotion, which, though it might not prove the destruction of all power, yet would surely and immediately be the destruction of their own. And if we might suppose that, through an extraordinary conjunction of circumstances, they should resolve among themselves the sacrifice of those laws on which public liberty is founded, they would no sooner lift up their eyes towards that extensive assembly, which views them with a watchful attention, than they would find their public virtue return upon them, and would make haste to resume that plan of conduct, out of the limits of which they can expect nothing but ruin and perdition.

In short, as the body of the people cannot act, without

the

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ng themselves to some power, or effecting a action, the only share they can have in a goth advantage to themselves, is not to interfluence to be able to act, and not to act.

of the people is not when they strike, but when they keep in awe: it is when they can overthrow every thing, that they never need to move: and Manlius included all in four words, when he said to the people of Rome-Ostendite bellum, pacem habebitis.

CHAP. XV.

Proofs, drawn from facts, of the truth of the principles laid down in the present work.-1. The peculiar manner in which revolutions have always been concluded in England.

It may not be sufficient to have proved by arguments the advantages of the English constitution; it will perhaps be asked, whether the effects correspond to the theory? To this question (which I confess is extremely proper) my answer is ready: it is the same which was once made, I believe, by a Lacedemonian, Come and see.

If we peruse the English history, we shall be particu larly struck with one circumstance to be observed in it, and which distinguishes most advantageously the English government from all other free governments; I mean the manner in which revolutions and public commotions have always been terminated in England.

If we read with some attention the history of other free states, we shall see that the public dissensions that have taken place in them have constantly been terminated by settlements in which the interests only of a few were really provided for, while the grievances of the many were hardly, if at all, attended to. In England, the very re verse has happened; and we find revolutions always to have been terminated by extensive and accurate provi sions for securing the general liberty.

The histories of the ancient Grecian commonwealths, and, above all, of the Roman republic, of which more complete accounts have been left us, afford striking proof of the former part of this observation.

What was, for instance, the consequence of that great revolution by which the kings were driven from Rome, and in which the senate and patricians acted as the ad

visers and leaders of the people? The consequence was, as we find in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Livy, that the senators immediately assumed all those powers lately so much complained of by themselves, which the kings had exercised. The execution of their future decrees was intrusted to two magistrates taken from their own body, and entirely dependent on them, whom they called consuls, and who were made to bear about them all the ensigns of power which formerly attended the kings. Only, care was taken that the axes and fasces, the symbols of the power of life and death over the citizens, which the senate now claimed to itself, should not be carried before both consuls at once, but only before one at a time, for fear, says Livy, of doubling the terror of the people.

Nor was this all: the senators drew over to their party those men who had the most interest at that time among the people, and admitted them as members into their own body; which indeed was a precaution they could not prudently avoid taking. But the interests of the great men in the republic being thus provided for, the revolution ended. The new senators as well as the old, took care not to lessen, by making provisions for the liberty of the people, a power which was now become their own. Nay, they presently stretched this power beyond its former tone; and the punishments which the consul inflicted, in a military manner, on a number of those who still adhered to the former mode of government, and even upon his own children, taught the people what they had to expect for the future, if they presumed to oppose the power of those whom they had thus unwarily made their masters.

Among the oppressive laws or usages which the senate, after the expulsion of the kings, had permitted to continue, what were most complained of by the people, were those by which such citizens as could not pay their debts, with the interest (which at Rome was enormous), at the appointed time, became slaves to their creditors, and were delivered over to them bound with cords: hence the word

Omnia jura (regum), omnia insignia, primi consules tenuere; id modò cautum est, ne, si ambo fasces haberent, duplicatus terror videretur. Tit. Liv. lib. ii. § 1.

These new senators were called conscripti: hence the name of = patres conscripti, afterward indiscriminately given to the whole senate.-Ibid.

neri, by which slaves of that kind were denominated. The cruelties exercised by creditors on those unfortunate men, whom the private calamities, caused by the frequent wars in which Rome was engaged, rendered very numerous, at last roused the body of the people: they abandoned both the city and their inhuman fellow-citizens, and retreated to the other side of the river Anio.

But this second revolution, like the former, only pro cured the advancement of particular persons. A new of fice was created, called the Tribuneship. Those whom the people had placed at their head, when they left the city, were raised to it. Their duty, it was agreed, was, for the future, to protect the citizens: and they were invested with a certain number of prerogatives for that purpose. This institution, it must, however, be confessed, would have, in the issue, proved very beneficial to the people, at least for a long course of time, if certain precautions had been taken with respect to it, which would have much lessened the future personal importance of the new tribunes: but these precautions the latter did not think proper to suggest; and in regard to those abuses themselves, which had at first given rise to the complaints of the people, no farther mention was made of them.t

As the senate and patricians, in the early ages of the commonwealth, kept themselves closely united, the tribunes, for all their personal privileges, were not able, during the first times after their creation, to gain an admittance either to the consulship or into the senate, and thereby to separate their condition any farther from that of the people. This situation of theirs, in which it was to be wished they might always have been kept, produced at first excellent effects, and caused their conduct to answer, in a great measure, the expectation of the people. The tribunes complained loudly of the exorbitancy of the powers possessed by the senate and consuls: and here we must observe, that the power exercised by the latter over the lives of the citizens had never been yet subjected

*Their number, which was only ten, ought to have been much greater; and they never ought to have accepted the power left to each of them, of stopping, by his single opposition, the proceedings of all the rest.

+ Many other seditions were afterward raised upon the same ac

count.