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Updated: June 5, 2025
Its truths are for the few, the best men are the teachers, equal as initiated partakers in the mysteries, supreme over all outside their society. A reasoned and reasonable order and method are symbolised by their theory of Number; their philosophy is political, their politics oligarchic.
In the month of October their efforts succeeded, thanks to the support of the French ambassador and soldiery; they dissolved the Assembly, annulled its recent amendments; and their influence procured for Reding, the head of the oligarchic party, the office of Landamman, or supreme magistrate.
Neither heredity, nor election, nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate. Whatever form it takes, monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic, royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd.
And thus in politics, there is the government of the many and the government of the few; or a democracy and an oligarchy: for an aristocracy may be considered as a species of oligarchy, as being also a government of the few; and what we call a free state may be considered as a democracy: as in the winds they consider the west as part of the north, and the east as part of the south: and thus it is in music, according to some, who say there are only two species of it, the Doric and the Phrygian, and all other species of composition they call after one of these names; and many people are accustomed to consider the nature of government in the same light; but it is both more convenient and more correspondent to truth to distinguish governments as I have done, into two species: one, of those which are established upon proper principles; of which there may be one or two sorts: the other, which includes all the different excesses of these; so that we may compare the best form of government to the most harmonious piece of music; the oligarchic and despotic to the more violent tunes; and the democratic to the soft and gentle airs.
Sulla's wife and children who had with difficulty escaped death, and not a few senators who had made their escape, sought refuge there, so that a sort of senate was soon formed at his head-quarters. Measures against Sulla The government did not fail to issue decrees against the oligarchic proconsul.
But the loyal Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they are there. Their operation has become to him like daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England is so complete as to be invisible.
Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation, and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary and the least of evils.
But though such an escape from strong central government and the substitution for it of a ruling class is not a supreme advantage, it has advantages of its own which every foreign historian of England has recognized, and it is the divisions into counties which, after the change of religion in the sixteenth century, was mainly responsible for the slow substitution of local and oligarchic for general, central, and bureaucratic government in England.
In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy performances in this line, no second government has ever attained at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this rests not on the Romans alone.
The oligarchic reign of terror bore doubtless a different stamp from that of the revolution; while Marius had glutted his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed to account terrorism in the abstract, if we may so speak, a thing necessary to the introduction of the new despotism, and to prosecute and make others prosecute the work of massacre almost with indifference.
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