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He will be also apt to wonder that a more fitting time could not be found for such philosophical debate than the epoch at which both the kingdom and the republic were called upon to strain every sinew against the most formidable and aggressive despotism that the world had known since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Those violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins. They were compact of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor. The most sanguinary tumults which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism. That very unruliness was educating the people for their future work.
Dante in his mountain solitudes invoked the Emperor, and Italy beheld the powerless march of Henry VII. Neither Pope nor Emperor was strong enough to control the currents of the factions which were surely whirling Italy into the abyss of despotism. Boniface died of grief after Sciarra Colonna, the terrible Ghibelline's outrage at Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to Avignon in 1316.
This was a formidable undertaking, requiring great sagacity and firmness, but it would doubtless be promotive of the welfare of Russia to be under the sway of one general sovereign, rather than to be exposed to the despotism of a hundred petty and quarrelsome princes.
From the beginning of the war he had illustrated the highest accomplishments of political oratory in bewailing, like the fabled prophetess of old, the coming woes which never came. In his address on the present occasion he arraigned the Republican party for imposing oppressive taxes, for inflicting upon the country a depreciated currency, and for enforcing a military despotism.
The name of Emperor, a remnant of Roman despotism, was still associated with an idea of autocracy, which, though it formed a ridiculous inconsistency with the privileges of the Estates, was nevertheless argued for by jurists, diffused by the partisans of despotism, and believed by the ignorant.
Every municipality has its own arbitrary code every battalion, every private soldier, exercises a sovereignty, a most absolute despotism; and yet the Gazettes do not cease to boast the excellence of such a government. They have, one and all, attributed the massacres of the tenth of August and the second of September, and the days following each, to a popular fermentation.
From that period to the last of January election, the said band appeared at the polls with the arms of the State, rejecting every vote that "was not of the true stripe," as they called it. That they frequently seized and dragged to the polls honest citizens, and compelled them to vote contrary to their will. "Such acts of arbitrary despotism were tolerated by the administration.
Yet, since kings have been more under the restraint of law, and the curb, however weak, of honour, the records of history are not filled with such unnatural instances of folly and cruelty, nor does the despotism that kills virtue and genius in the bud, hover over Europe with that destructive blast which desolates Turkey, and renders the men, as well as the soil unfruitful.
Despotism is the most inveterate of all the diseases of the social organism which ignorance has inflicted; nay, it is a complication of all its diseases.
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