its growth the inducements to honest exertion as steadily decline. Population becomes, to use the modern phrase, superabundant; and as man diminishes in value, we mark a growing thirst for plunder, and an increased facility in obtaining troops by help of whom it may be secured. Licentiousness and dissipation become universal, and towns and cities are everywhere plundered by mercenaries, always ready to sell their services to the highest bidder. Military command is courted as the only road to fortune, and the fortunes thus acquired are expended in bribing the people to secure their votes. New oppressions next produce the Social War, carried on as had been that of the Peloponnesus-by exterminating the males, selling the women and children as slaves, and confiscating all their property; and thus on and on may we trace the people of Attica, exhausting themselves in the effort to impede the movement of others—until, at length, they find themselves mere instruments in the hands of Philip of Macedon, from whom they pass, successively, to Alexander and his lieutenants.

The object of the Athenians, from the date of the Persian wars, is everywhere seen to have been that of obtaining a monopoly of power, and a monopoly of trade as a means of securing the enjoyment of power. The more the city and its port could be rendered the emporium, the greater would be its ability to control the action of those dependent upon it as a place in which their exchanges might be made. Not only, therefore, were those with whom they were at war driven from the ocean, but neutral vessels were constantly seized and detained in defiance of law; and it was with great difficulty that ships, or goods, so detained, were ever extricated from their captors' hands. In reading the history of the proceedings of the "Mistress of the Seas" of that day, and of her prize courts, it is difficult to avoid being struck with the resemblance between them and those of recent days, when the seas were swept of neutrals by help of "the Rule of '56," paper blockades, and "Orders in Council." With every step in that direction, there became developed a greater tendency towards embargoes, and prohibitions of intercourse; to one of which latter was, in no slight degree, due the Peloponnesian war. All these measures tended to diminish the movement of society abroad; but equally to produce a diminution in the power of voluntary association at home;

and that diminution went on increasing from year to year, until the once proud republic - having first passed through the hands of Macedonian kings and Roman proconsuls-is seen to be represented by troops of slaves; while Atticus remains almost sole owner, and sole improver, in the land that, in earlier and happier days, had given food and raiment, prosperity and happiness, to hundreds of thousands of industrious freemen.

§ 4. Commencing, necessarily, the work of cultivation on the poorest soils, SPARTA never went beyond them; and for the reason that her institutions were based upon the idea of preventing all voluntary association, and discouraging commerce, in all and every form. Man was there regarded in no other light than that of a machine, or instrument, forming a component part of an imaginary being called The State; to the gratification of whose pride, rancor, or revenge, all his feelings and affections required to be sacrificed. Failing to marry, he was liable to be punished; but when married, the intercourse between himself and his wife was rendered difficult, in hopes thereby to stimulate the sexual appetite, and thus promote the growth of population. Children being the property of the State, the parents could exercise no control whatever over their education, whether physical, moral, or intellectual. The home had no existence, for not only were parents deprived of the society of their children, but they might not even eat in private. Her people could neither buy nor sell; nor might they in any manner, whatever avail themselves of the services of those most useful metals, gold and silver. They might not study the sciences, nor might they indulge their tastes for music; while from all descriptions of theatrical amusement they were entirely debarred. The tendency of the system being thus adverse to the development of the individual faculties, wealth could not grow, nor could they, themselves, advance beyond the earliest and rudest pursuits-those looking to the appropriation of the property of others; and therefore it was that, while always engaged in war, they proved themselves ever ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Poor and rapacious, perfidious and tyrannical, the history of Sparta is but a long record of growing inequality and constantly retarded motion of society until at length we find her soil passing under the control of a few pro

prietors, surrounded by hosts of slaves; preparatory to her passage out of existence - leaving, as her sole bequest to posterity, the record of her avarice and her crimes.

§ 5. The history of CARTHAGE is little more than a record of wars made for the purpose of monopolizing trade, and of which Corsica and Sardinia, Sicily and Spain, were the most important theatres. Colonies were to be secured, that they might be deprived of all intercourse with the world, except through the medium of Carthaginian ships and merchants; and the contributions of the colonists furnished to the central treasury means for the extension of the system under which they suffered. Elsewhere, where colonies could not be established, all the movements of the trader were shrouded in the strictest secresy-monopoly being the object; and means the most unscrupulous being everywhere resorted to, for securing that it should be maintained. Tolerating no rivals, they guarded, as state secrets, everything connected with the caravan trade-while ever ready to license pirates who desired to seize their neighbors' ships. Monopolies filled the treasury, the disposal of whose revenues gave power to an aristocracy with whom trade was the first and most important object; and to secure themselves in the exercise of power, they subsidized barbarians of all the countries from the southern Sahara to the northern Gaul. The splendor of the city greatly increased; but, as usual in all such cases - the real weakness existing in the ratio of the show of apparent strength-the day of trial proved that the foundation of the social edifice had been laid upon "gold dust and sand," and not upon a rock; and Carthage passed from existence, leaving behind nothing but the further proof afforded by its history, of the truth of the proposition, that "those who live by the sword must die by the sword."

§ 6. In the days of Numa and of Servius, the people of ROME cultivated the fertile soils, and the Campagna was filled with cities, having each an independent existence-and constituting, each, a local centre towards which gravitated the people of the surrounding country. Under their successors, the Tarquins, we find a change, and from that time forward, until we reach the downfall

of the empire, the energies of Rome are seen to have been unceasingly devoted to the prevention of all peaceful association among her neighbors-towards appropriation of their propertyand towards the centralization of all power within her walls. The city grew in splendor, but with that growth there came a corresponding decline in the condition of her people, until, at length, we find them reduced to pauperism, and dependent upon daily distributions of bread-the contribution of distant provinces taxed for their support; and thus is the history of Rome but a repetition, upon a grander scale, of that of Athens. Palaces rise within and without the city, but with every step in this direction we see a diminution in the power of voluntary association among its people. The land that formerly gave support to thousands of small proprietors is next abandoned, or, when cultivated at all, is tilled by slaves; and the more enslaved the people of the country, the greater becomes the necessity for public distributions in the city - towards which flock all who seek to live by means of plunder. Panem et circenses—free bread and free exhibitions of gladiatorial and other brutal fights constitute now the sole bill of rights of the degraded populace. From age to age the city grows, with corresponding decline in the motion of society constituting commerce. Depopulation and poverty spread from Italy to Sicily and Greece-to hither and further Gaul-to Asia and to Africa; until, at length, decayed at the heart, the empire passes away, having existed for almost a thousand years, a model of rapacity, dishonesty, and fraud; and having, in the whole period, produced scarcely a dozen men whose names have descended to posterity with an untarnished fame.

Traders, gladiators, and buffoons were regarded by the Romans as belonging to the self-same class, and yet the Roman history is but a record of traders' operations on the largest scale. For centuries following the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the establishment of aristocratic power, we witness a perpetual war between plebeian debtors-impoverished by means of the constant wresting of the law to the purposes of the rich and nobleand their patrician creditors, proprietors of private dungeons, in which they incarcerated the men whose only crime consisted in an inability to pay their debts. Later, we find the city filled

with knights, accustomed to place themselves as middlemen between those who had taxes to pay and revenue to receive, purchasing the right of taxation at the cheapest price, and selling it at the dearest one-paying to the receiver the smallest sum, and collecting from the poor tax-payer the largest one. Scipio traded his conscience for plunder of the treasury, and when requested to produce his accounts, adjourned the meeting to the temple, there to return thanks to the gods for the victories by help of which he had been enriched.* Verres, in Sicily, and Fonteius, in Gaul, were but traders. Brutus lent money at four per cent. per month, and Cæsar would probably have paid at a higher rate than even this for the millions he had borrowed, had he succeeded in placing himself on an imperial throne. All dealt in slaves, the products of whose labors they monopolized, while treating in the harshest manner the unfortunate people subjected to their power.

§ 7. Turning now to VENICE, we witness a perpetual succession of wars for trade, with constant tendency to the centralization of power in the hands of the few whom the chances of birth, or fortune, had placed in the direction of the state. Originally democratic, we find its government becoming with each succeeding age more aristocratic, until at length we reach the closing of the grand council against all who had not already places there.† That, in its turn, was followed by the establishment of the celebrated Council of Ten, whose spies penetrated into every house; whose tortures might reach every individual, however elevated; and whose existence was totally incompatible with any approach towards freedom of commerce. Following up her history, we find her always seeking trade by means of warlike interferences with the movements of others-obtaining colonies to be adminis

* In relation to this period, M. Guizot says, (History of Civilization, p. 14:) "Take Rome, for example, in the splendid days of the republic, at the close of the second Punic war; the moment of her greatest virtues, when she was rapidly advancing to the empire of the world when her social condition was evidently improving." This was, nevertheless, the period in which land was everywhere becoming consolidated when the free citizens were disappearing when slaves were most rapidly increasing in number -- when gladiatorial games were introduced when the people were most rapidly becoming demoralized and when the great men of Rome were building the largest palaces within and without the city-all of these things being evidences of a decline of social condition." 66

† 1286.