as the farmer does the hog he keeps to feast upon.  He holds him fast in his sty, but allows him to wallow as much as he pleases in his beloved filth and gluttony.  So scandalously debauched a people as that of Venice is to be met with nowhere else.  High, low, men, women, clergy, and laity, are all alike.  The ruling nobility are no less afraid of one another than they are of the people; and, for that reason, politically enervate their own body by the same effeminate luxury by which they corrupt their subjects.  They are impoverished by every means which can be invented; and they are kept in a perpetual terror by the horrors of a state inquisition.  Here you see a people deprived of all rational freedom, and tyrannized over by about two thousand men; and yet this body of two thousand are so far from enjoying any liberty by the subjection of the rest, that they are in an infinitely severer state of slavery; they make themselves the most degenerate and unhappy of mankind, for no other purpose than that they may the more effectually contribute to the misery of a whole nation.  In short, the regular and methodical proceedings of an aristocracy are more intolerable than the very excesses of a despotism, and, in general, much further from any remedy.

Thus, my lord, we have pursued aristocracy through its whole progress; we have seen the seeds, the growth, and the fruit.  It could boast none of the advantages of a despotism, miserable as those advantages were, and it was overloaded with an exuberance of mischiefs, unknown even to despotism itself.  In effect, it is no more than a disorderly tyranny.  This form, therefore, could be little approved, even in speculation, by those who were capable of thinking, and could be less borne in practice by any who were capable of feeling.  However, the fruitful policy of man was not yet exhausted.  He had yet another farthing candle to supply the deficiencies of the sun.  This was the third form, known by political writers under the name of democracy.  Here the people transacted all public business, or the greater part of it, in their own persons; their laws were made by themselves, and, upon any failure of duty, their officers were accountable to themselves, and to them only.  In all appearance, they had secured by this method the advantages of order and good government, without paying their liberty for the purchase.  Now, my lord, we are come to the masterpiece of Grecian refinement, and Roman solidity,—­a popular government.  The earliest and most celebrated republic of this model was that of Athens.  It was constructed by no less an artist than the celebrated poet and philosopher, Solon.  But no sooner was this political vessel launched from the stocks, than it overset, even in the lifetime of the builder.  A tyranny immediately supervened; not by a foreign conquest, not by accident, but by the very nature and constitution of a democracy.  An artful man became popular, the people had power in their