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Such a man deserves the support and respect of his countrymen, and I have no doubt he has them.... It is high time we should assume a more American tone while Europe is leaving no stone unturned to vilify and traduce us, because the rotten despotisms of Europe fear our example and hate us. You are not aware, perhaps, that the Trollope system is political altogether.
In other words, it has seemed to me that the things which I have studied were originally produced during the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediæval countries, France, Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle Ages which is mediæval no longer, but already more than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.
The thus called arbitrary acts of the government prove how easily, on the plea of patriotic necessity, a people, nay, the public opinion, submits to arbitrary rule. All this, servility included, explains the facility with which, in former times, concentrated and concrete despotisms have been established.
God then stayed the further progress of emancipation in Europe, because the spread of the asserted liberty would have made infidelity prevail over that part of the continent where the Reformation was arrested. God preferred Romanism, and other despotisms, modified as they were by the struggle, to rule for a time, than have those countries destroyed under the sway of a licentious freedom.
The only choice the case admits is a choice of despotisms, and it is not certain that the despotism of twenty millions is necessarily better than that of a few or of one; but it is quite certain that the despotism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know any thing about their subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of those who do.
In diplomacy I deny also the palm. For although India is a case in point, like as Texas, yet even there we have never first planted a population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government, but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms.
Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is dying so hard.
How many despotisms have risen and fallen among the Persians and Hindoos, and everybody knows quite well that the public management of the irrigation was the prime necessity of agriculture in those places.
"It is not in our commonwealth as in despotisms," said the Advocate, "where affairs of state are directed by the nod of two or three individuals, while the rest of the inhabitants are a mob of slaves. By turns, we all govern and are governed. This great council, this senate should it seem not sufficiently fortified against your presents-could easily be enlarged.
It becomes a superior caste, ruling over vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere.
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