party that may oppose them, and so divide the reputation. Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions and combinations that are adverse to the State, and setting them at distance, or, at least, distrust among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the State be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.

3

I have noted, that some witty and sharp speeches, which have fallen from princes, have given fire to seditions. Cæsar did himself infinite hurt in that speech, Sylla nescivit literas, non potuit dictare;' for it did utterly cut off that hope which men had entertained, that he would at one time or other give over his dictatorship. Galba undid himself by that speech, Legi a se militem, non emi;'3 for it put the soldiers out of hope of the donative. Probus, likewise, by that speech, 'Si vixero, non opus erit amplius Romano imperio militibus;'4 a speech of great despair for the soldiers; and many the like. Surely princes had need, in tender matter and ticklish times, to beware what they say, especially in these short speeches, which fly abroad like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions; for, as for large discourses, they are flat things, and not so much noted.

Lastly, let princes, against all events, not be without some great person, one or rather more, of military valour, near unto them, for the repressing of seditions in their beginnings; for, without that, there useth to be more trepidation in court upon the first breaking out of trouble than were fit; and the State runneth the danger of that which Tacitus saith—‘Atque is habitus animorum fuit, ut pessimum facinus auderent pauci, plures vellent, omnes paterentur;'5 but let such military per

1 Distance. Enmity.

'Banquo was your enemy,

So is he mine; and in such bloody distance,
That every minute of his being thrusts
Against my near'st of life.'-Shakespere.

2 Sylla was ignorant of letters and could not dictate.' (This pun is attributed to Cæsar by Suetonius. Vit. C. Jul. Cæs. 77, 1.)

3 He levied soldiers, and did not buy them.'-Tac. Hist. i. 5.

4 If I live, the Roman Empire will need no more soldiers.'-Flav. Ves. Vit. Prob. 20.

5 And such was the state of their minds, that the worst villany a few dared, more approved of it, and all tolerated it.'-Hist. i. 28.

sons be assured' and well reputed of, rather than factious and popular-holding also good correspondence with the other great men in the State; or else the remedy is worse than the disease.

ANNOTATIONS.

"Neither let any prince or State be secure concerning discontentments, because they have been often, or have been long, and yet no peril hath ensued.

Men underrate the danger of any evil that has been escaped. An evil is not necessarily unreal, because it has been often feared without just cause. The wolf does sometimes enter in, and make havoc of the flock, though there have been many false alarms. The consequence of feeling too secure, and not being prepared, may be most disastrous when the emergency does arise. And the existence of a power to meet the emergency is not the less important because the occasions for the exercise of may be very few. If any one should be so wearied with the monotonousAll's well' of the nightly guardians of a camp, hour after hour, and night after night, as to conclude that their service was superfluous, and, accordingly, to dismiss them, much real danger, and much unnecessary apprehension, would be the result.

it

'Let no prince measure the danger of discontentments by this whether the griefs whereupon they rise be great or

The importance of this caution with regard to small griefs' will not be denied by any one who has observed the odd limitations of power in those who seem despotic, and yet cannot do what seem little things. E.g., when the Romans took possession of Egypt, the people submitted, without the least resistance, to have their lives and property at the mercy of a foreign nation; but one of the Roman soldiers happening to kill a cat

1 Assured. Not to be doubted; trustworthy. It is an assured experience, that flint laid at the root of a tree will make it prosper.'-Bacon's Natural History.

in the streets of Alexandria, they rose on him and tore him limb from limb; and the excitement was so violent, that the generals overlooked the outrage for fear of insurrection!— Claudius Cæsar tried to introduce a letter which was wanting in the Roman Alphabet-the consonant V as distinct from U,— they having but one character for both. He ordered that I (an F reversed) should be that character. It appears on some inscriptions in his time; but he could not establish it, though he could KILL or plunder his subjects at pleasure. So can the Emperor of Russia; but he cannot change the style. It would displace the days of saints whom his people worship; and it would produce a formidable insurrection! Other instances of this strange kind of anomaly might doubtless be produced.

Amongst the causes of sedition Bacon has not noticed what is, perhaps, the source of the most dangerous kinds of sedition, the keeping of a certain portion of the population in a state of helotism, as subjects without being citizens, or only imperfectly and partially citizens. For, men will better submit to an undistinguishing despotism that bears down all classes alike, than to an invidious distinction drawn between privileged and subject classes.

On this point I will take the liberty of citing a passage from a former work:

The exclusion from the rights of citizenship of all except a certain favoured class-which was the system of the Grecian and other ancient republics-has been vindicated by their example, and recommended for general adoption, by some writers, who have proposed to make sameness of religion correspond, in modern States, to the sameness of race among the ancients,—to substitute for their hereditary citizenship the profession of Christianity in one and the same National Church.

'But attentive and candid reflection will show that this would be the worst possible imitation of one of the worst of the Pagan institutions; that it would be not only still more unwise than the unwise example proposed, but also even more opposite to the spirit of the christian religion than to the maxims of sound policy.

'Of the system itself, under various modifications, and of its effects, under a variety of circumstances, we find abundant records throughout a large portion of history, ancient and modern; from that of the Israelites when sojourners in Egypt, down to that of the Turkish Empire and its Greek and other christian subjects. And in those celebrated ancient republics of which we have such copious accounts in the classic writers, it is well known that a man's being born of free parents within the territory of a certain State, had nothing to do with conferring civil rights; while his contributing towards the expenses of its government, was rather considered as the badge of an alien,1 the imposing of a tax on the citizens being mentioned by Cicero2 as something calamitous and disgraceful, and not to be thought of but in some extraordinary emergency.

'Nor were the proportionate numbers at all taken into account. In Attica, the metoci or sojourners appear to have constituted about a third of the free population; but the Helots in Lacedæmon, and the subjects of the Carthaginian and Roman Republics, outnumbered the citizens, in the proportion probably of five, and sometimes of ten or twenty to one. Nor again were alien families considered as such in reference to a more recent settlement in the territory; on the contrary, they were often the ancient occupiers of the soil, who had been subdued by another race; as the Siculi (from whom Sicily derived its name), by the Siceliots or Greek colonists.

6

The system in question has been explained and justified, on the ground that distinctions of Race implied important religious and moral differences; such that the admixture of men thus differing in the main points of human life, would have tended, unless one Race had a complete ascendancy, to confuse all notions of right and wrong. And the principle, accordingly, of the ancient republics,-which has been thence commended as wise and good-has been represented as that of making agreement in religion and morals the test of citizenship.

'That this however was not, at least in many instances, even the professed principle, is undeniable. The Lacedæmonians reduced to helotism the Messenians, who were of Doric race, like themselves; while it appears from the best authorities, that

Matt. xvii. 25.

M

2 De Off. b. 11, ch. xxi.

the kings of those very Lacedæmonians were of a different race from the people, being not of Dorian, but of Achaian extraction. There could not have been therefore, at least universally, any such total incompatibility between the moral institutions and principles of the different races. The vindication, therefore, of the system utterly fails, even on the very grounds assumed by its advocates.

'If, however, in any instance such an incompatibility did exist, or (what is far more probable) such a mutual dislike and jealousy, originating in a narrow spirit of clanship-as to render apparently hopeless the complete amalgamation of two tribes as fellow-citizens on equal terms, the wisest the only wise-course would have been an entire separation. Whether the one tribe migrated in a mass to settle elsewhere, or the territory were divided between the two, so as to form distinct independent States,-in either mode, it would have been better for both parties, than that one should remain tributary subjects of the other. Even the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain, was not, I am convinced, so great an evil, as it would have been to retain them as a degraded and tributary class; like the Greek subjects of the Turkish empire.

'For, if there be any one truth which the deductions of reason alone, independent of history, would lead us to anticipate, and which again history alone would establish independently of antecedent reasoning, it is this: that a whole class of men placed permanently under the ascendancy of another as subjects, without the rights of citizens, must be a source, at the best, of weakness, and generally of danger, to the State. They cannot well be expected, and have rarely been found, to evince much hearty patriotic feeling towards a community in which their neighbours look down on them as an inferior and permanently degraded species. While kept in brutish ignorance, poverty, and weakness, they are likely to feel-like the ass in the fable— indifferent whose panniers they bear. If they increase in power, wealth, and mental development, they are likely to be ever on the watch for an opportunity of shaking off a degrading yoke.

1 It is very remarkable that this fact has been adverted to, and prominently set forth by an author who, in the very same work, maintains the impossibility of different Races being amalgamated together in the same community. He appears to have quite forgotten that he had completely disproved his own theory.