American Democrats of the nineteenth century, a man who received
the highest honors which his party could bestow, that the
Constitution of the United States was made, not to promote
Democracy, but to check it. This statement is true, and it is as
true of the Venetian Constitution as of the American.[1]


[1] See Horatio Seymour's noted article in the North American
Review.


But while both the republics recognized the necessity of curbing
Democracy, the difference between the means employed was
world-wide. The founders of the American Republic gave vast
powers and responsibilities to a president and unheard-of
authority to a supreme court; in the Venetian Republic the Doge
was gradually stripped of power, but there was evolved the
mysterious and unlimited authority of the Senate and Council of
Ten.

In these sat the foremost Venetians, thoroughly imbued with the
religious spirit of their time; but, religious as they were, they
were men of the world, trained in the polities of all Europe and
especially of Italy.

In a striking passage, Guizot has shown how the Crusaders who
went to the Orient by way of Italy and saw the papacy near at
hand came back skeptics. This same influence shaped the statesmen
of Venice. The Venetian Ambassadors were the foremost in Europe.
Their Relations are still studied as the clearest, shrewdest, and