of power over their prostrate fellow creatures."

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