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.  At the period of which we write, Italy had several of these self-styled commonwealths, in not one of which, however, was there ever a fair and just confiding of power to the body of the people, though perhaps there is not one that has not been cited sooner or later in proof of the inability of man to govern himself!  In order to demonstrate the fallacy of a reasoning which is so fond of predicting the downfall of our own liberal system, supported by examples drawn from transatlantic states of the middle ages, it is necessary only to recount here a little in detail the forms in which power was obtained and exercised in the most important of them all.

Distinctions in rank, as separated entirely from the will of the nation, formed the basis of Venetian polity.  Authority, though divided, was not less a birthright than in those governments in which it was openly avowed to be a dispensation of Providence.  The patrician order had its high and exclusive privileges, which were guarded and maintained with a most selfish and engrossing spirit.  He who was not born to govern, had little hope of ever entering into the possession of his natural rights:  while he who was, by the intervention of chance, might wield a power of the most fearful and despotic character.  At a certain