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Updated: June 16, 2025
"And sitting there me and Maximilian Jones, scratching at our prickly heat and kicking at the lizards on the floor, became afflicted with a dose of patriotism and affection for our country. And Maximilian Jones pours out whole drug stores of his wrath on oligarchies and potentates in red trousers and calico shoes.
Yes. Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please.
What are the essential aspects of the ideal of liberty? Throughout a long stretch of human history one of the most vexing obstacles to general happiness and progress has been the irresponsible power of sovereigns and oligarchies. To generations it has seemed that if freedom from selfish tyranny could but be won, the millennium would be at hand.
What was copied was not the free republic of London, with its noble traditions of civic honour and sagacious public spirit, but the imperfect republics or oligarchies into which the lesser English boroughs were sinking, amid the foul political intrigues and corruption which characterized the Stuart period.
Happily for them, Napoleon's death came too near to the terrific commotion caused by the French Revolution. Tumult raged round the Emperor during the whole of his public career, and powerful agencies were constantly proclaiming against him and his methods. His advent had brought with it a new form of democracy, which cast down oligarchies and despotisms everywhere.
The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to oligarchy and corruption.
Nor is this serviceable to tyrants only; nor is it tyrants only who do it; for the same thing is practised both in oligarchies and democracies: for the ostracism has in a manner nearly the same power, by restraining and banishing those who are too great; and what is done in one city is done also by those who have the supreme power in separate states; as the Athenians with respect to the Samians, the Chians, and the Lesbians; for when they suddenly acquired the superiority over all Greece, they brought the other states into subjection, contrary to the treaties which subsisted between them.
But no person who knows anything of human nature will impute such errors to depravity. Mr Mitford is not more consistent with himself than with reason. Though he is the advocate of all oligarchies, he is also a warm admirer of all kings, and of all citizens who raised themselves to that species of sovereignty which the Greeks denominated tyranny.
No country can be protected, policed, and have its justice administered without taxes, and the provincials were not paying more, and were often paying much less, as well as paying it in a more just and rational way, than when they were being taxed by their own kings, their own oligarchies, or their own socialistic democracies.
But the disaster of defeat was nothing in comparison with its consequences. To recover their prisoners, the Athenian government were compelled to enter into a treaty with the hostile oligarchies and withdraw their forces from Boeotia. On their departure, the old oligarchies everywhere replaced the friendly democracies, and the nearest neighbours of Athens were again her foes.
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