endowed with leisure and opulence; and it is in this very class that a nation is first struck with decay.

Another prominent cause of the decline of Athens was the nearness of the people to the public treasury. Peculation in the public funds is the great vice of democracies. In other forms of government it is confined to a few, from the very structure of aristocratic institutions; but in democracies it spreads its contaminating influence far and wide, from the multitude of offices, and the crowd of aspirants. At Athens the Assembly had its hands upon the public treasury, and it could not resist the temptation to distribute among the people, under various forms and pretenses, a portion of its ample stores. Their successful inventions to draw forth the public moneys must have cast into the hands of every citizen who desired it a part at least of his yearly subsistence. Such practices, however speciously disguised, tend to a gradual demoralization of the people. Although a frugal if not an empty treasury is a blessing to a democracy, yet it ever happens that democracies, from the cheapness of the government and the universal prevalence of the spirit of trade, are famous for overflowing treasuries. If the three millions of dollars which yearly flow into our coffers from the canals of the State were free to be appropriated, it would be a miracle of virtue if our Legislature, reputable as it is now acknowledged to be, did not in the course of time become the most corrupt body on the face of the earth.

While a proper administration of the public funds in a popular government is one of the most difficult ends to be secured, a departure from the strict principles of integrity in such high places of trust operates more decisively to unsettle the morals of the people than a prostration of honesty in any other department of life. To this single point, the faithful application of the public moneys, a degree of watchfulness verging upon solicitude should ever be directed, not because an economy of gold and silver is needful for the general welfare, but for the higher reason that an economy of the public morals tends to riches of virtue and integrity infinitely more essential and inestimable than are the material wealth of nations. The Athenians could not resist the craving inclination to render the national treasury subservient to their private advantage: it remains to be seen how we, as a people, shall be able to meet this same question.

The highest test of any race is its ability to perpetuate its existence through the lapse of centuries; to ever approach its meridian, but never reach it; to rise higher and higher in the scale of civilization, but never culminate. The race which

lives the longest with a constant progress towards a higher intelligence and a purer morality, must take the highest rank in the family of nations. The ascent of the Athenians was slow and toilsome; but after they had reached their meridian, in the age of Perikles, they lost in fifty years all they had gained in centuries. Their civil fabric crumbled in pieces, because it rested upon too narrow a basis; but chiefly for the reason that their civilization was of a purely intellectual cast, and unsustained by those moral elements upon which alone a lasting edifice can be erected. They undervalued the moral attributes of character as much as they exalted the intellectual; thus casting away the only permanent foundation of national greatness, not to say of happiness. They also adhered to the Greek political maxim, that a small territory was indispensable to a well-regulated democracy.* A thirst for territorial aggrandizement within the Peloponnesus on the west, or towards Thrace upon the north, seems never to have enlisted their desires; however eager they may have been for island and commercial possessions. Athens should have aimed to spread her empire from the Egean sea to the Adriatic, and to have drawn the Grecian race within the folds of her democracy, made ample for its reception, not by conquest, or injustice, or cupidity, but by the peaceful and silent expansion of democracy itself. By this means they would have discovered the uses of the representative system, which is the peculiar feature as well as safeguard of modern republics. Had they rested themselves upon a territorial foundation sufficiently broad, and introduced a community of privileges through all classes, it is, at least, a pleasing conjecture that the Athenian empire would have surpassed the Roman in material greatness as much as it did in intellectual achievements.

The unrestricted power of the Popular Assembly was another of the prominent causes of the overthrow of Athens. Representing, as it did, the sovereign authority of the people, in its very constitution it was averse to all restraint, and easily capable of overpowering every adverse element which met it in collision. The absence of a fundamental law, to limit and define its powers, and of a judiciary to correct its aberrations, left it exposed to the dangers of precipitate counsels and of tumultuous passions. But, above all, it was the prolific cause of demagogueism, which became at times so prevalent and so dangerous. By arousing the passions and exciting the prejudices of the people, the vilest and the basest politicians were frequently enabled to disturb and sway the action of the

* Arist. Polit., lib. vii., cap. 5.

Popular Assembly, and perhaps impel it into unwise and illconsidered measures. Athens suffered more from this pestiferous class than from all of her public enemies put together. The intervention of the representative system would have proved an efficient safeguard against the machinations of this class, whose field of operations is usually limited to the vilest portion of the population; but they might have found a more durable protection in a constitution which should limit and control the action of the public Legislature. Under institutions like ours, where there is substantially an unlimited extension of the elective franchise, neither the fundamental law nor the representative system furnishes a perfect shield against the intrusion of demagogueism. Their sphere, and the amount of qualifications, are simply enlarged. An American demagogue, to rise into influence and position, needs, in addition to the ordinary characteristics of knavery and baseness of heart, a higher degree of intelligence and tact than was to be found in the Athenian demagogue. He is the same style of a man, but with greater powers of mischief under a greater degree of control. The intelligence and virtue of the people is the only permanent protection against the insidious arts of profligate and ambitious men. Up to the present period of our history, from the universal prevalence of prosperity, and the absence of a densely crowded population, American legislation has kept itself tolerably pure from the influence of this troublesome class. But at Athens the decision of the Assembly was carried into execution oftentimes before the excitement in which the measure originated subsided sufficiently to admit of a sober reconsideration. In this fact lay the power of the demagogues, and the danger of the state.

The fate of a genuine democracy, when corrupted in its elements, presents an interesting question, which may with propriety be adverted to in this connection. It will be suf ficient to present the idea, to affirm, that when the great principles of the democratic theory have been thoroughly indoctrinated into any people, and transmitted beyond one generation, if afterwards the people become so corrupt as to overthrow their democratic institutions, they descend first to anarchy, and thence to barbarism, but never take refuge in monarchy. The sequence of institutions will be found to be from monarchy to democracy, through all the transition species of government; but the extremes do not then meet. It requires the intervention of barbarism to complete the circuit. The Athenians never could be induced to appoint a dictator in any emergency of peril, however great and threatening, because it was a negation of the fundamental idea of

their institutions; it was bestowing a species of power antagonistic to every principle of their democracy. Neither would they, in the periods of their greatest degeneracy, so long as they continued free, surrender the great principle of selfgovernment, through the agency of the Popular Assembly. But at Rome, which never understood the democratic theory in any true sense whatever, the first refuge, not of the people, but of the aristocracy, in times of danger, was in the dictatorship.*

The last cause of the decline of Athens to which a reference will be made, was the impurity of its religious system. Its civilization did not rest upon a moral basis. It not only reposed its hopes of the perpetuity of the race upon the cultivation of the intellect and the sense of physical beauty, but its religious system was in itself utterly incapable of maturing and strengthening those moral elements which alone. can bind society together with enduring power. Its standards of virtue and of right were fallible, and clothed with human infirmities, thus preventing the essential principles of morality from assuming that immutable form which can only be deduced from perfect examples. Anaxagoras and Sokrates, indeed, looked above Olympus towards the realm of the Supreme Intelligence, and obtained glimpses of that uncreated Being who raised Olympus to the skies; but the vision of the people could not rise above its snow-clad summit, or penetrate beyond these fabled deities who abode upon this sacred mountain of the Greeks. Although we are forced to admire the Grecian mythology, as the most stupendous production of genius and credulity which ever sprang from the imagination and the affections of man, we cannot overlook its tendencies to debase the moral sense, and to pervert the religious nature of man. With the little in their hands, the Greeks could have left but little to be achieved by the residue of the human family.

Notwithstanding the blemishes upon the Athenian democracy, its glories far surpass its defects. It was this ancient democracy which first opened the intellectual world in all its magnificence and grandeur. Greek thoughts, discoveries, and experience, have never ceased to influence the human race. The science of government and of law, philosophy, rhetoric, logic, poetry, history, architecture, sculpture, and painting; these leading elements of civilization were first unfolded with accuracy and fulness at Athens; were first studied with the discrimination of the scholar, and the devotion of a lover of

*The μovapxov of the Greeks corresponded exactly with the Latin Dictator.

knowledge. But two of the elements of modern civilization (natural science and Christianity) were deficient; which may serve to remind us that we have not enlarged the field of learning very far beyond the vision of the Grecian intellect, if we have penetrated to greater depths. Through the treasures of knowledge which they, and especially the Athenians, left behind them, modern society was enabled to reconstruct itself, and emerge once more from barbarism. For many centuries their literature was from necessity the chief intellectual food of the moderns.

There is a fragrance in the very name of Athens, which twenty centuries have not dissipated. She still lives, and will live for ever. She lives in the language we speak, in the literature we cultivate, and in the constellations which deck the evening sky. Immortality is written upon the achievements of Athens; an immortality which neither the lapse of years nor flight of time can change or lessen. When the last column of the Parthenon shall have fallen; when the Propylæa shall have crumbled into dust; when the Akropolis itself shall have become an undistinguished eminence, the name of Athens will survive yet other centuries; it will live with perpetual freshness in the minds of men, until Learning herself shall have descended to the tomb, and the human intellect shall have ceased to glow under the inspiration of genius.

LIFE OF LAS CASAS.

Ir is now about seventy years since the first English work appeared in which an account was given of the discovery of the southern portion of America. In this was described the character of the prominent individuals who composed the company of adventurers; but this account, as far as biography is concerned, is confined (as naturally it should be) to a description of the few who were most daring. The silent endeavors of more tranquil-spirited persons were slightly noticed, even when their aims were most praiseworthy. Even in works of a later period, when new facts have been discovered, and the materials for authentic history greatly augmented, we find that, after the illustrious leader, Columbus, the names brought into notice are chiefly of those who figure as warriors or as unscrupulous adventurers, mainly intent on personal aggrandizement or the acquirement of wealth. Mankind in all ages are dazzled by military prowess; and if to this be joined a moderate portion of civil