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Such were the struggles made by Cicero himself; though there was present always to him an idea, with which, in truth, neither the demagogues nor the aristocrats sympathized, that the reform could be effected, not by depriving the Senate of its power, but by teaching the Senate to use it honestly. We can sympathize with the idea, but we are driven to acknowledge that it was futile.
Let the Grays guard five miles of it on the Brown side and the Browns five miles on the Gray side, as insurance against surprise or the ambitions of demagogues. What an example for those other nations beyond Europe, as yet lacking your organization and progress, whom you must aid and direct! What a return to you in both moral and commercial profit!
He had some thoughts to have reduced them by force, but was overpowered by demagogues and factions.
But the demagogues of Europe have made strange discoveries. A republic is not, according to them, the rule of the majority, as has hitherto been taught, but the rule of those who are strenuous partisans of the majority. It is not the people who preponderates in this kind of government, but those who best know what is for the good of the people.
The vast expansiveness of his mighty soul had no resemblance with the paltry impulses of demagogues. In acquiring rights for the people he seemed as though he bestowed them. He was a volunteer of democracy.
From selfish ambition, from thoughtless zeal, from reckless partisanship, from the low motives governing demagogues in a country of universal suffrage, men are ever sowing the wind, thinking they can control the whirlwind; and the story of the Gironde and the Mountain has been related in vain. The President was charmed with the Convention.
But not only did these natural causes co-operate to produce a metropolitan rabble: neither the nobility nor the demagogues, moreover, can be acquitted from the reproach of having systematically nursed its growth, and of having undermined, so far as in them lay, the old public spirit by flattery of the people and things still worse.
He was more formidable than Essex in the reign of Elizabeth, or Bassompierre in the time of Richelieu. He was a man of profligate life, but of marked ability and boundless ambition. He had a band of numerous and faithful followers, armed and desperate. He was also one of those oily and aristocratic demagogues who bewitch the people, not, as in our times, by sophistries, but by flatteries.
Although the unwearied exertions of Bright, Roebuck, and other leading Radicals, could not arouse the people to that state of unreasoning excitement in which these demagogues delight, yet the tone of the press and the spirit of the public meetings gave proof that the importance of the crisis was not wholly underrated.
I believe there has been as yet discovered no other basis of government so safe, so stable as popular suffrage, but the fathers never contemplated a suffrage without intelligence. It is a contradiction of terms. A proletariat without any political rights in a republic is no more dangerous than an unintelligent mob which can be used in elections by demagogues.
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