by experience that the democracy has become a plutocracy. The influence of
wealth, though not the enjoyment of it, has become diffused among the poor
as well as among the rich; and society, instead of being safer, is more at
the mercy of the tyrant, who, when things are at the worst, obtains a
guard--that is, an army--and announces himself as the saviour.

The other consideration is of an opposite kind. Admitting that a few wise
men are likely to be better governors than the unwise many, yet it is not
in their power to fashion an entire people according to their behest. When
with the best intentions the benevolent despot begins his regime, he finds
the world hard to move. A succession of good kings has at the end of a
century left the people an inert and unchanged mass. The Roman world was
not permanently improved by the hundred years of Hadrian and the Antonines.
The kings of Spain during the last century were at least equal to any
contemporary sovereigns in virtue and ability. In certain states of the
world the means are wanting to render a benevolent power effectual. These
means are not a mere external organisation of posts or telegraphs, hardly
the introduction of new laws or modes of industry. A change must be made
in the spirit of a people as well as in their externals. The ancient
legislator did not really take a blank tablet and inscribe upon it the
rules which reflection and experience had taught him to be for a nation's
interest; no one would have obeyed him if he had. But he took the customs
which he found already existing in a half-civilised state of society:
these he reduced to form and inscribed on pillars; he defined what had
before been undefined, and gave certainty to what was uncertain. No
legislation ever sprang, like Athene, in full power out of the head either
of God or man.

Plato and Aristotle are sensible of the difficulty of combining the wisdom
of the few with the power of the many. According to Plato, he is a