not only of the cares of the state, but of all power to redress
themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to exclaim:

Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
And occupations perish.

This is but natural: it is but natural for a mother to have more
regard for her son than for a whole city; but then the city should
be left to take some care of itself. The care of the state cannot,
we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the
domestic charities of high life. The great have private feelings of
their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must
curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of
the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to
them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of
OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR
wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude. If they had the
superior knowledge ascribed to them (which they have not) it would
only render them so much more formidable; and from Gods would
convert them into Devils. The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is
that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have
much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor;
therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves; therefore they
ought to be beaten. They work hard; therefore they ought to be
treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant; therefore they
ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or
rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the
logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize
what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise
power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down