tenacious of the name of a republic, was,
in truth, a narrow, a vulgar, and an exceedingly heartless oligarchy. To
the former title she had no other claim than her denial of the naked
principle already mentioned, while her practice is liable to the
reproach of the two latter, in the unmanly and narrow character of its
exclusion, in every act of her foreign policy, and in every measure of
her internal police. An aristocracy must ever want the high personal
feeling which often tempers despotism by the qualities of the chief or
the generous and human impulses of a popular rule. It has the merit of
substituting things for men, it is true, but unhappily it substitutes
the things of a few men for those of the whole. It partakes, and it
always has partaken, though necessarily tempered by circumstances and
the opinions of different ages, of the selfishness of all corporations
in which the responsibility of the individual, while his acts are
professedly submitted to the temporizing expedients of a collective
interest, is lost in the subdivision of numbers. At the period of which
we write, Italy had several of these self-styled commonwealths, in not
one of which, however, was there ever a fair and just confiding of power
to the body of the people, though perhaps there is not one that has not
been cited sooner or later in proof of the inability of man to govern
himself! In order to demonstrate the fallacy of a reasoning which is so
fond of predicting the downfall of our own liberal system, supported by
examples drawn from transatlantic states of the middle ages, it is
necessary only to recount here a little in detail the forms in which
power was obtained and exercised in the most important of them all.

Distinctions in rank, as separated entirely from the will of the nation,
formed the basis of Venetian polity. Authority, though divided, was not
less a birthright than in those governments in which it was openly
avowed to be a dispensation of Providence. The patrician order had its
high and exclusive privileges, which were guarded and maintained with a
most selfish and engrossing spirit. He who was not born to govern, had
little hope of ever entering into the possession of his natural rights:
while he who was, by the intervention of chance, might wield a power of
the most fearful and despotic character. At a certain age all of
senatorial rank (for, by a specious fallacy, nobility did not take its
usual appellations) were admitted in