After the overthrow of the democracy at Cheronea, the greatest thinker of antiquity addressed his comprehensive mind, in the full maturity of his experience, to the subject of government, and although, as we have stated, one of his two political works is perished, we still possess, in the other, a treasure of which it is impossible to overrate the value.

Aristotle is not obnoxious to the remark we have just made in reference to Plato and Xenophon as having written recentibus odiis. He treats that in a spirit as severely philosophical as any other of the multifarious subjects of his all-searching inquiries. There is no more reason to suspect him of passion or partiality, in regard to democracy or oligarchy, than in his Metaphysics or his Analytics, his Topics or his Rhetoric. He gives us the natural history of governments, as he does that of plants or animals, and seems equally above his matter in both. A thorough acquaintance with this important work, we hold to be indispensable to any correct knowledge of the political institutions of antiquity. It must not be read only, but made, book by book, and chapter by chapter, the subject of deep study and meditation. There is nothing superfluous or superficial in it; not a sentence but is full of thought and meaning, expressed always concisely, sometimes perhaps abruptly, never, we think, obscurely. We detect, clearly, the want of this critical knowledge of the work in Mitford and other writers of that time, and on the other hand, it is just as evident, that the great German philologists of the present day, have used the Politics as a key to the whole civil history of Greece, and as a fixed point of reference in all their inquiries. Niebuhr, for instance, has found in it a lamp to light his path in the darkness of Roman antiquity, which he has so successfully explored, and some of his most instructive and satisfactory views are but generalizations of hints and principles derived from Aristotle. We would point, for examples of this, to the use he has made in regard to the legislation of Servius Tullius, of what the Greek philosopher has said of the changes effected by Cleisthenes in the constitution of the Attic tribes. So as to the comparative inefficiency of the plebs in the comitia of Rome, because residing on their farms at a distance, their attendance in those assemblies was inconvenient and irregular. Both the authors at the head of

Arist. Pol. VI. 4. cf. VII. 9. So as to the remark that confiscations and forfeitures ought to be consecrated to the gods.

this article, (as we have already had occasion to remark of Mr. Hermann,) have drawn continually, and, with the greatest advantage, upon the same copious fund.

What is most remarkable, however, in this great work, is its spirit, and the general conclusion to which, when fairly interpreted, it clearly leads. We have said that Aristotle is exempt from all passion or prejudice, on the subject of popular government. He had studied, for twenty years together, under Plato, in the academy, and left Athens a mature man of thirty-seven. But a part of his life had been passed in a very different station. He was employed, as every body knows, by the victor of Cheronea, to "teach great Alexander to subdue the world," He was, for many years, therefore, an inmate of a court, such as it was, and if we are to receive the description Demosthenes has left us, of Philip's manner of living, as any thing but the grossest caricature, there was, surely, nothing in that court to captivate or dazzle any body, and least of all, such a mind as the Stagirite's. He might have learned there the truth he teaches, that "despotism is apt to love low company." He had seen at once the frail and feverish being of the democracy, with its odious demagogical tyranny, and its wild delirious transports, extinguished with ease, by a coarse but compact military power, and "young Ammon" turned loose to scourge mankind and to forget him- ' self, and his philosophy, and his native land, in the vice and debauchery, the swilled insolence and barbaric haughtiness of oriental despotism. There can be no doubt, we should think, that this opportunity of comparing what he saw with his own eyes, of democracy under the lead of such men as Demades, with an autocracy of that kind, this view of society, passing through revolution and conquest from one extreme to another, was eminently well fitted not only to inform his mind, but to temper it, and to make his judgment as cool as his philosophy was profound, penetrating, and comprehensive. It was just such a discipline as public opinion in France has undergone from the delirium of their first enthusiasm for liberty, and their scarcely less mad lust of dominion under a military despot, to an inglorious subjection to a yoke fastened upon them by foreigners, until sleeping off in this forced repose the fumes of their double intoxication, they have been brought at length to think seriously of the necessity and the advantages of a juste milieu.

But whatever effect this instructive experience may have

had in counteracting or correcting the disgust naturally inspired by the vices and excesses of the degenerate democracy of Athens, no unprejudiced man, it appears to us, can read, with proper attention, the whole context of Aristotle's Politics, without coming to the conclusion that the best form of government, in his opinion, is a well tempered popular constitution, or at least, a constitution in which the popular element was very strong and active. He does not, like Plato and Xenophon, when he speaks of a perfect commonwealth, imagine the reign of a patriot king. Neither does he entertain that extravagant admiration for the Doric model, especially the institutions of Lycurgus, for which they are distinguished. One of the most striking parts of his work, is his examination of the ideal republic of Plato, which in many points, such as the community of wives and the education of women, was a copy of those institutions. He seems to have had some faith in the PEOPLE, So far as that word was applicable at all to the condition of ancient society, that is, in communities made up of some distinguished race-in the calm judgment of masses-in the common sense of mankind deliberately expressed and fairly collected under forms calculated to check power, to repress passion, and to give time for discussion and reflection. A government so well ordered as to deserve the name of a polity, par excellence, (Horeca,) was distinguished from an aristocracy, (and this latter word implies in his use of it nothing narrow or oligarchical,) by leaning more to the side of the many than of the nobles.* Nay, it was even a more popular form than the constitution of Solon and Cleisthenes. He says expressly, that what he called (in conformity, no doubt, to general usage) by that complimentary name, would have passed in those earlier times (so aristocratic were they) for a government of the many. So, he considers a system in which the people delegate their high powers to others, as an aristocracy, so that all representative government would fall within that category. Another fundamental principle on which he repeatedly insists, is, that no government, not founded on justice, can be durable. But, then, this justice is relative, and not absolute, in its nature, and to be determined by the actual condition of society, and the opinion of mankind, one age requiring that a greater num

*L. V. c. 7. So where all are eligible to office, but the best elected. Ib. c. 8. Comp. 1. IV. 15, where he contrasts a government of laws with one of men; and the very definition of polity. III. c. 7.

ber should be admitted to take part in public affairs than another, and it being in all cases important to interest as many as possible in the preservation of the existing order of things-a combination, be it remarked by the way, of the historical and the rational, the prescriptive and the positive, worthy, on every account, of particular attention. Accordingly, he considers, as the state of society most favorable for free governments, that in which the whole population is homogeneous, all, as nearly as may be, on a footing of equality, all in comfortable and independent circumstances in regard to estate, and the majority engaged in agricultural and other rural pursuits. Had he written with a view to our actual condition in this country, he could not have described more perfectly the advantages we enjoy for maintaining social order and equal rights. He denounces all inequality as a never failing source of strife and sedition. It is true, this equality, like the justice which is its convertible term, is relative. Mere "arithmetical equality" he regards as a violation of all "distributive justice," the great end of civil society. A system by which the voice of the wise, the experienced, and the good, is always drowned in the clamors of a majority, composed of ignorant and violent men, he thought the very worst sort of inequality, and this, as we shall see in the sequel, was the common voice of antiquity. This would be, in fact, only an oligarchy turned upside down. If, says he, the majority, being possessed of estates above a certain amount, should exclude those who were less fortunate from any share in public affairs, though the few were shut out and the many governed, nobody would call that democracy. So, where the majority, being without fortune, drive the better sort of people from the public service, or deprive them of the weight and the influence to which they are fairly entitled, the evil is precisely the same, but in a more aggravated degree. It is unjust, and cannot last. The government he considers as the best, is such a one as might be variously characterized by observers according to their systems, as a democracy or an aristocracy-that is to say, a well-balanced republic. This observation was afterwards applied by Polybius to the constitution of Rome, in the age of the Scipios.

This leads us to remark, that another fundamental truth, which he clearly develops, is, that none of the simple forms

See Plut. Conviv. VIII. Q. II. § 2, 3. Id de Frater. Amore XII. Arist. VII. 3. 14. V. 9. and III. 7; the definition of a polity is express.

of government could be good-that unlimited power, under every name and every shape, is equally tyrannical, and produces exactly the same effects on society, or effects so nearly the same, that the difference is scarcely worth the trouble of a choice between them. This morbid anatomy of governments is treated with an ability as impartial as it is masterly. Tacitus himself has not painted despotic monarchy more fearfully after nature. Niebuhr speaks of the devilish spirit of the ancient oligarchy, and cites a passage of the Politics to prove it. Aristotle shows that all governments perish by pushing to excess their peculiar principles-as the sin that most easily besets them. Thus, in democracies, instead of leaning to the side (the weaker side) of law and order, the profligate man who made politics a trade, and the commonwealth a spoil, never ceased to stir up the envy of the multitude against the rich, until by their attacks upon property, or by other wrongs, the upper classes, driven to desperation, flew to arms, and civil wars and military despotism followed of course. He asks, how is it that a well balanced constitution was so rarely to be met with, and answers, that it is because most governments have sprung up out of revolutions, and breathed the spirit of the revengeful and exterminating passions that produced them. They were "reactions," the offspring of hate, not the work of reason, and presented the image of a city taken by storm, rather than of a polity adopted with mature deliberations, by the common counsels for the common good of a community.

Yet sound and masculine as is the tone of Aristotle's political philosophy, he paints the degenerate democracy, of which he had so many opportunities to witness the excesses both when a student in the academy and as a professor or teacher in the Lyceum on his return to Athens, in colors not at all less sombre, though less highly charged, than those used by Plato and Xenophon. Indeed, without the experience of the French revolution, as Mitford remarks, it would be difficult for a modern to believe, or even to conceive, the possibility of such horrors as appear, from his account, to have occurred in what may be called the daily experience, and to have flowed naturally from the very constitution of those turbulent commonwealths. And, on the contrary, the Jacobins might

*The better tempered the government the better. Pol. IV. 12.-V. 1. + Romisch. Geschichte, v. II. 337, 8. Der nämliche Geist der Hölle, etc. He quotes Arist. Pol. v. 9. of the oath, etc., a passage often cited since.