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Updated: April 30, 2025
The ancient aristocrats now naturally reappeared and attempted to re-establish the oligarchical governments of the foregoing century. A Count Senfft von Pilsach, a pretended Austrian envoy, who was speedily disavowed, assumed the authority at Berne with so much assurance as to succeed in deposing the existing government and reinstating the ancient oligarchy.
That oligarchical party, which had always been hostile to the doctrines of Calvin and to the House of Orange, muttered faintly that His Majesty ought to resign the Stadtholdership. But all such mutterings were drowned by the acclamations of a people proud of the genius and success of their great countryman. A day of thanksgiving was appointed.
The system of Switzerland was too limited and homely, that of Venice too purely oligarchical, to have much moral for us now, or to render a study of their pathological phenomena especially instructive. The lessons taught us by the history of the Netherland confederacy may have more permanent meaning.
The Lacedæmonian Brasidas, however who had distinguished himself at Pylos effected an entry, so that the oligarchical and Peloponnesian party became permanently established in power. The most important operations were now in two fields.
In these two brief remarks, taken singly, or, especially, in juxtaposition, from so representative a source, and so characteristic of oligarchical opinions everywhere, appears condensed the suggestive political warning of these times, indeed of all times, and which a people regardful of civil and religious liberty can never be slow to heed.
Grote has told at length how out of these appendages of the original kingdom the free States of Greece derived their origin, and how they gradually grew the oligarchical States expanding the council, and the democratical expanding the assembly. The history has as many varieties in detail as there were Greek cities, but the essence is the same everywhere.
This body, like a little State within the State, proved formidable to the republic itself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised over burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time it became the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, and threatened to change the free constitution of the city into a government conducted by a few powerful families.
But the early "democratical man" of that valley, even if he came remotely from such oligarchical sires as Socrates gives immediately to all democratical men, reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through no such sensual definition of life.
In some sort the mantle of Sulla had fallen upon him. He was the leader of what we may call the conservative party. If, which I doubt, the political governance of men was a matter of interest to him, he would have had them governed by oligarchical forms.
Dick Avenel, the son of a small tradesman, standing against the Right Honourable Audley Egerton, the choice of the powerful Lansmere aristocratic party, standing, too, with his nephew by his side; taking, as he himself was wont to say, "the tarnation Blue Bull by both its oligarchical horns!" there was a pluck and gallantry in the very impudence of the attempt to convert the important borough for one member of which a great earl had hitherto striven, "with labour dire and weary woe" into two family seats for the House of Avenel and the triumph of the Capelocracy.
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