to it by joining it with things which they know will take hold of the minds of the poople. By presenting, in their speeches, arguments and facts which men have no time to examine, they lead the people into gross, and yet decisive errors; and the common-places of rhetoric, supported by their personal influence, ever enable them to draw to their side the majority of votes.

On the other hand, the few (for there are after all some) who having meditated on the proposed question, see the consequences of the decisive step which just going to be taken, being lost in the crowd, cannot make their feeble voices to be heard in the midst of the universal noise and confusion. They have it no more in their power to stop the general motion, than a man in the midst of an army on a march, has it in his power to avoid marching. In the mean time, the people are giving their suffrages; a majority appears in favour of the proposal; it is finally proclaimed as the general will of all; and it is at bottom nothing more than the effect of the artifices of few designing men, who are exulting among themselves.

It was thus the senate, at Rome, assumed to itself the power of laying taxes. They promised, in the time of the war against the Veientes, to give pay to such citizens as would inlist; and to that end they established a tribute. The people, solely taken up with the idea of not going to warat their own expence, were trans. ported with so much joy, that they crowded at the door of the senate, and laying hold of the hands of the senators, called them their fathers-Nihil unquam acceptum à plebe tanto gaudio traditur: concursum itaque curiam esse, prehensatasque exeuntium manus, patres vere appellatos, &c. See Tit. Liv. book iv.

I might confirm all these things by numberless instances from ancient history; but, if I may be allowed, in this case, to draw examples from my own country, & celebrare domestica facta, I shall relate facts which will be no less to the purpose. In Geneva, in the year 1707, a law was enacted, that a general assembly of the people should be held every five years, to treat of the affairs of the republic; but the magistrates, who dreaded those assemblies, soon obtained from the citizens themselves the repeal of the law and the first resolution of the people, in the first of these periodical assemblies (in the year 1712) was to abolish them for ever. The profound secrecy with which the magistrates prepared their proposal to the citizens on that subject, and the sudden manner in which the latter, when assembled, were acquainted with it, and made to give their votes upon it, have indeed accounted but imperfectly for this strange determination of the people; and the consternation which seized the whole assembly when the result of the

In a word, those who are acquainted with republican governments, and in general, who know the manner in which business is transacted in numerous assemblies, will not scruple to affirm, that the few who are united together, who take an active part in public affairs, and whose station makes them conspicuous, have such an advantage over the many who turn their eyes towards them, and are without union among themselves, that, even with a middling degree of skill, they can at all times direct, at their pleasure, the general resolutions; that, as a consequence of the very nature of things, there is no proposal, however absurd, to which a numerous assembly of men may not, at one time or other, be brought to assent; and that the laws would be wiser, and more likely to procure the advantage of all, if they were to be made by drawing lots, or casting dice, than by the suffrages of a multitude. suffrages was proclaimed, has confirmed many in the opinion, that some unfair means had been used. The whole transaction has been kept secret to this day; but the common opinion on this subject, which has been adopted by M. Rousseau in his Lettres de la Montagne, is this: the magistrates, it is said, had privately. instructed the secretaries in whose ears the citizens were to whisper their suffrages: when a citizen said approbation, he was understood to approve the proposal of the magistrates; when he said rejection, he was understood to reject the periodical assemblies.

In the year 1738, the citizens at once enacted into laws a small code of forty-four articles, by one single line of which they bound themselves for ever to elect the four syndics (the chiefs of the council of twenty-five) out the members of the same council; whereas they were before free in their choice. They at that time suffered also the word approved to be slipped into the law mentioned in the note p. 100, which was transcribed from a former code; the consequence of which was to render the magistrates absolute masters of the legislature.

The citizens had thus been successively stripped of all their political rights, and had little more left to them than the pleasure of being called a sovereign assembly, when they met (which idea, it must be confessed, preserved among them a spirit of resistance which it would have been dangerous for the magistrates to provoke too far) and the power of at least refusing to elect the four syndics. Upon this privilege the citizens have, a few years ago, made their last stand; and a singular conjunction of circumstances having happened at the same time, to raise and preserve among them, during three years, an uncommon spirit of union and perseverance, they have in the issue succeeded in a great measure to repair the injuries which they had been made to do to themselves, for these last two hundred years and more.

CHAP. VI.

ADVANTAGES THAT ACCRUE TO THE PEOPLE FROM APPOINTING REPRESENTATIVES.

How then shall the people remedy the disadvantages that necessarily attend their situation? How shall they resist the phalanx of those who have engrossed to themselves all the honours, dignities, and power, in the state ?

It will be by employing for their defence the same means by which their adversaries carry on their attacks: it will be by using the same weapons as they do, the same order the same kind of discipline.

They are a small number, and consequently easily united; a small number must therefore be opposed to them, that a like union may also be obtained. It is because they are a small number, that they can deliberate on every occurrence, and never come to any resolutions but such as are maturely weighed: it is because they are few, that they can have forms which continually serve them for general standards to resort to, approved maxims to which they invariably adhere, and plans which they never lose sight of. Here therefore, I repeat it, oppose to them a small number, and you will obtain the like advantages.

Besides, those who govern, as a farther consequence of their being few, have a more considerable share, consequently feel a deeper concern in the success, whatever it may be, of their enterprizes. As they usually profess a contempt for their adversaries, and are at all times acting an offensive part against them, they impose on themselves an obligation of conquering. They, in short, who are all alive from the most powerful incentives, and aim at gaining new advantages, have to do with a multitude, who, wanting only to preserve what they already possess, are unavoidably liable to long intervals of inactivity and supineness. But the people, by appointing representatives, immediately gain to their cause that advantageous activity which they before stood in need of, to put them on a par with their adversaries; and those passious become excited in their defenders, by which they them selves cannot possibly be actuated.

Exclusively charged with the care of public liberty, the representatives of the people will be animated by a sense of the greatness of the concerns with which they are intrusted. Distinguished from the bulk of the nation, and forming among themselves a separate assembly, they will assert the rights of which they have been made the guardians, and with all that warmth which the esprit de corps is used to inspire. Placed on an elevated theatre, they will endeavour to render themselves still more conspicuous; and the art and ambitious activity of those who govern, will now be encountered by the vivacity and perseverance of opponents actuated by the love of glory.

Lastly, as the representatives of the people will naturally be selected from among those citizens who are most favoured by fortune, and will have consequently much to preserve, they will, even in the midst of quiet times, keep a watchful eye on the motions of power. As the advantages they possess will naturally create a kind of rivalship between them and those who govern, the jealousy which they will conceive against the latter, will give them an exquisite degree of sensibility on every increase of their authority. Like those delicate instruments which discover the operations of nature, while they are yet imperceptible to our senses, they will warn the people of those things which of themselves they never see but when it is too late; and their greater proportional share, whether of real riches, or of those which lie in the opinions of men, will make them, if I may so express myself, the barometers that will discover, in its first beginning, every tendency to a change in the constitution.b

a If it had not been for an incentive of this kind, the English commons would not have vindicated their right of taxation with so much vigilance as they have done, against all enterprizes, often perhaps involuntary, of the lords.

bAll the above reasoning essentially requires, that the representatives of the people should be united in interest with the people. We shall soon see that this union really obtains in the English constitution, and may be called the master-piece of it.

THE

CHAP. VII.

SUBJECT CONTINUED. THE ADVANTAGES THAT ACCRUE TO THE PEOPLE FROM THEIR APPOINTING REPRESENTATIVES, ARE VERY INCONSIDERABLE, UNLESS THEY ALSO ENTIRELY TRUST THEIR LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY TO THEM.

THE observations made in the preceding chapter are so obvious, that the people themselves, in popular governments, have always been sensible of the truth of them, and never thought it possible to remedy, by themselves alone, the disadvantages necessarily attending their situation. Whenever the oppressions of their rulers have forced them to resort to some uncommon exertion of their legal powers, they have immediately put themselves under the direction of those few men who had been instrumental in informing and encouraging them; and when the nature of the circumstances has required any degree of firmness and perseverance in their conduct, they never have been able to attain the ends they proposed to themselves, but by means of the most implicit deference to those leaders whom they had thus appointed.

But as these leaders, thus hastily chosen, are easily intimidated by the continual display which is made before them of the terrors of power; as that unlimited confidence which the people now repose in them, only takes place when public liberty is in the utmost danger, and cannot be kept up otherwise than by an extraordinary conjunction of circumstances, and in which those who govern seldom suffer themselves to be caught more than once; the people have constantly sought to avail the mselves of the short intervals of superiority which the chance of events had given them, for rendering durable those advantages which they knew would, of themselves, be but transitory, and for getting some persons appointed, whose peculiar office it should be to protect them, and whom the constitution should thenceforwards recognize. It is thus that the people of Lacedæmon obtained their ephori, and the people of Rome their tribunes.