e that officers of their rank and station would
necessarily acquire, could have attempted to decide such a momentous
question in so ridiculous and trivial a manner. And yet the account is
seriously recorded by Herodotus as sober history, and the story has
been related again and again, from that day to this, by every
successive generation of historians, without any particular question
of its truth.

And it may possibly be that it is true. It is a case in which the
apparent improbability is far greater than the real. In the first
place, it would seem that, in all ages of the world, the acts and
decisions of men occupying positions of the most absolute and exalted
power have been controlled, to a much greater degree, by caprice and
by momentary impulse, than mankind have generally supposed. Looking up
as we do to these vast elevations from below, they seem invested with
a certain sublimity and grandeur which we imagine must continually
impress the minds of those who occupy them, and expand and strengthen
their powers, and lead them to act, in all respects, with the
circumspection, the deliberation, and the far-reaching sagacity which
the emergencies continually arising seem to require. And this is, in
fact, in some degree the case with the statesmen and political leaders
raised to power under the constitutional governments of modern times.
Such statesmen are clothed with their high authority, in one way or
another, by the combined and deliberate action of vast masses of men,
and every step which they take is watched, in reference to its
influence on the condition and welfare of these masses, by many
millions; so that such men live and act under a continual sense of
responsibility, and they appreciate, in some degree, the momentous
importance of their doings. But the absolute and independent
sovereigns of the Old World, who held their power by conquest or by
inheritance, though raised sometimes to very vast and giddy
elevations, seem to have been unconscious, in many instances, of the
dignity and grandeur of their standing, and to have considered their
acts only as they affected their own personal and temporary interests.
Thus, though placed on a great elevation, they took only very narrow
and circumscribed views; they saw nothing but the objects immediately
around them; and they often acted, accordingly, in the most frivolous
and capricious manner.

It was so, undoubtedly, with these six conspirators. In deciding which