custody of elect representatives, a secret which has changed the
face of the world, should have been missed by nations applying so
vast an energy to the whole theory of public administration. But
the truth, however paradoxical, is, that in Greece and Rome no body
of public opinions existed that could have furnished a standing ground
for adverse parties, or that consequently could have required to be
represented. In all the dissensions of Rome, from the secessions
of the Plebs to the factions of the Gracchi, of Marius and Sylla,
of Caesar and Pompey; in all the ςασεις of the Grecian
republics,--the contest could no more be described as a contest of
opinion, than could the feuds of our buccaneers in the seventeenth
century, when parting company, or fighting for opposite principles
of dividing the general booty. One faction has, another sought
to have, a preponderant share of power: but these struggles never
took the shape, even in pretence, of differences that moved through
the conflict of principles. The case was always the simple one of
power matched against power, faction against faction, usage against
innovation. It was not that the patricians deluded themselves by
any speculative views into the refusal of intermarriages with the
plebeians: it was not as upon any opinion that they maintained the
contest, (such as at this day divides ourselves from the French upon
the question of opinion with regard to the social rank of literary
men) but simply as upon a fact: they appealed to evidences not to
speculations; to usage, not to argument. They were in possession,
and fought against change, not as inconsistent with a theory, but
as hostility to an interest. In the contest of Caesar with the
oligarchic knavery of Cicero, Cato, and Pompey, no possible exercise
of representative functions (had the people possessed them) could
have been applied beneficially to the settlement of the question at
issue. Law, and the abuses of law, good statutes and evil customs,