has most influence, are always of the purest public practice.  It follows as a corollary from this proposition, that a representation should be as real as possible, for its tendency will be inevitably to elevate national morals.  Miserable, indeed, is the condition of that people, whose maxims and measures of public policy are below the standard of its private integrity, for the fact not only proves it is not the master of its own destinies, but the still more dangerous truth, that the collective power is employed in the fatal service of undermining those very qualities which are necessary to virtue, and which have enough to do, at all times, in resisting the attacks of immediate selfishness.  A strict legal representation of all its interests is far more necessary to a worldly than to a simple people, since responsibility, which is the essence of a free government, is more likely to keep the agents of a nation near to its own standard of virtue than any other means.  The common opinion that a Republic cannot exist without an extraordinary degree of virtue in its citizens, is so flattering to our own actual condition, that we seldom take the trouble to inquire into its truth; but, to us, it seems quite apparent that the effect is here mistaken for the cause.  It is said, as the people are virtually masters in a Republic, that the people ought to be virtuous to rule well.  So far as this proposition is confined to degrees, it is just as true of a Republic as of any other form of government.  But kings do rule, and surely all have not been virtuous; and that aristocracies have ruled with the very minimum of that quality, the subject of our tale sufficiently shows.  That, other things being equal, the citizens of a Republic will have a higher standard of private virtue than the subjects of any other form of government, is true as an effect, we can readily believe; for responsibility to public opinion existing in all the branches of its administration, that conventional morality which characterizes the common sentiment, will be left to act on the mass, and will not be perverted into a terrible engine of corruption, as is the case when factitious institutions give a false direction to its influence.

The case before us was in proof of the truth of what has here been said.  The Signor Soranzo was a man of great natural excellence of character, and the charities of his domestic circle had assisted in confirming his original dispositions.  Like others of his rank and expectations, he had, from time to time, made the history and polity of the self-styled Republic his study, and the power of collective interests and specious necessities had made him admit sundry theories, which, presented in another form, he would have repulsed with indignation.  Still the Signor Soranzo was far from understanding the full effects of that system which he was born to uphold.  Even Venice paid that homage to public opinion, of which there has just been question, and held forth to the