principles and measures which he wished to see adopted; and so great was the reverence for him that the people listened to his instructions, and afterward deliberated and acted among themselves.  He did not write out a code, but he told the people what they should put into it.  He was the animating genius of the city; his voice was obeyed.  He unfolded the theory that the government of one man, in their circumstances, would become tyrannical; and he taught the doctrine, then new, that the people were the only source of power,—­that they alone had the right to elect their magistrates.  He therefore recommended a general government, which should include all citizens who had intelligence, experience, and position,—­not all the people, but such as had been magistrates, or their fathers before them.  Accordingly, a grand council was formed of three thousand citizens, out of a population of ninety thousand who had reached the age of twenty-nine.  These three thousand citizens were divided into three equal bodies, each of which should constitute a council for six months and no meeting was legal unless two-thirds of the members were present.  This grand council appointed the magistrates.  But another council was also recommended and adopted, of only eighty citizens not under forty years of age,—­picked men, to be changed every six months, whom the magistrates were bound to consult weekly, and to whom was confided the appointment of some of the higher officers of the State, like ambassadors to neighboring States.  All laws proposed by the magistrates, or seigniory, had to be ratified by this higher and selecter council.  The higher council was a sort of Senate, the lower council were more like Representatives.  But there was no universal suffrage.  The clerical legislator knew well enough that only the better and more intelligent part of the people were fit to vote, even in the election of magistrates.  He seems to have foreseen the fatal rock on which all popular institutions are in danger of being wrecked,—­that no government is safe and respected when the people who make it are ignorant and lawless.  So the constitution which Savonarola gave was neither aristocratic nor democratic.  It resembled that of Venice more than that of Athens, that of England more than that of the United States.  Strictly universal suffrage is a Utopian dream wherever a majority of the people are wicked and degraded.  Sooner or later it threatens to plunge any nation, as nations now are, into a whirlpool of dangers, even if Divine Providence may not permit a nation to be stranded and wrecked altogether.  In the politics of Savonarola we see great wisdom, and yet great sympathy for freedom.  He would give the people all that they were fit for.  He would make all offices elective, but only by the suffrages of the better part of the people.