In the great debate, in the British Parliament, on the African slave-trade, Mr. WHITBREAD said: 

“Arbitrary power would spoil the hearts of the best.”

But we need not multiply proofs to establish our position:  it is sustained by the concurrent testimony of sages, philosophers, poets, statesmen, and moralists, in every period of the world; and who can marvel that those in all ages who have wisely pondered men and things, should be unanimous in such testimony, when the history of arbitrary power has come down to us from the beginning of time, struggling through heaps of slain, and trailing her parchments in blood.

Time would fail to begin with the first despot and track down the carnage step by step.  All nations, all ages, all climes crowd forward as witnesses, with their scars, and wounds, and dying agonies.

But to survey a multitude bewilders; let us look at a single nation.  We instance Rome; both because its history is more generally known, and because it furnishes a larger proportion of instances, in which arbitrary power was exercised with comparative mildness, than any other nation ancient or modern.  And yet, her whole existence was a tragedy, every actor was an executioner, the curtain rose amidst shrieks and fell upon corpses, and the only shifting of the scenes was from blood to blood.  The whole world stood aghast, as under sentence of death, awaiting execution, and all nations and tongues were driven, with her own citizens, as sheep to the slaughter.  Of her seven kings, her hundreds of consuls, tribunes, decemvirs, and dictators, and her fifty emperors, there is hardly one whose name has come down to us unstained by horrible abuses of power; and that too, notwithstanding we have mere shreds of the history of many of them, owing to their antiquity, or to the perturbed times in which they lived; and these shreds gathered from the records of their own partial countrymen, who wrote and sung their praises.  What does this prove?  Not that the Romans were worse than other men, nor that their rulers were worse than other Romans, for history does not furnish nobler models of natural character than many of those same rulers, when first invested with arbitrary power.  Neither was it mainly because the martial enterprise of the earlier Romans and the gross sensuality of the later, hardened their hearts to human suffering.  In both periods of Roman history, and in both these classes, we find men, the keen sympathies, generosity, and benevolence of whose general character embalmed their names in the grateful memories of multitudes. They were human beings, and possessed power without restraint—­this unravels the mystery.