CHAPTER XX. GREECE—VENICE—THE RULE OF “CASTE.”
Although ancient Greece was divided into many small countries, yet they were united by bonds of union, of community, of blood and language, of religious rites and festivals, manners and character. In these respects they were distinguished from all other people, whom they called barbarians.
A thousand years before the Christian era the Greeks were divided into the nobles, who were powerful and wealthy; the freemen, some of whom owned estates; and the slaves.
But the manners of the highest class were simple. The nobles were proud of their skill in the manual arts, and their wives and daughters ably discharged their household duties.
Two hundred years later (B.C. 800) most of the states and cities of Greece became democratic. One uniform method characterized the change from monarchy to democracy. An oligarchy of nobles would overthrow the monarchy, and then some one noble would overthrow the oligarchy and establish the cause of the people.
Sparta was the highest type of oligarchy; Athens of democracy.
Ever since Aristotle distinguished them, there have been three recognized types of government—monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy—the rule of one man, the rule of a few men, and the rule of the people.
That the last is the just and the true form of polity, the enlightened opinion of the world has long ago irrevocably decided. Of the other two, experience shows that monarchy is more tolerable. A Nero may have stained the pages of history by the diabolic cruelty to which autocratic power gave free scope; a Napoleon may have poured out half the life-blood of his country to further his selfish personal ambition; yet, on the whole, the evils of one man’s rule have been more endurable than those of the domination of a class or “caste.” In latter days the sovereign has come to be looked upon less as a personal ruler than as an abstraction—an embodiment of theory expressed in the old maxim that “the king can do no wrong”—a conception far less offensive to the innate democracy of all manly peoples; or, he is regarded as a mere figure-head, as may be said to be the case is England, whose nominal monarch has far less practical influence upon the executive and legislative departments than has the President of the United States.
An oligarchy is the worst of all governmental systems. It has never made a people truly great. Wherever such a government has existed its record has almost always been dark and its end bloody.
Look, for example, at two of the most successful oligarchies of history—ancient Sparta and mediæval Venice. Sparta was, as Bulwer justly observes in his “Rise and Fall of Athens,” a “machine wound up by the tyranny of a fixed principle, which did not permit it even to dine as it pleased; its children were not its own—itself had no property in self. So it flourished and decayed, bequeathing to fame men only noted for hardy valor, fanatical patriotism, and profound but dishonorable craft—attracting, indeed, the wonder of the world, but advancing no claim to its gratitude and contributing no single addition to its intellectual stores.”
Such was the state that was ruled by the privileged “caste” of the Spartans and its administrative committee, the Ephoræ—a state remembered only for its brief military supremacy over her Grecian neighbors. Contrast her with one of those neighbors—Athens, the most typical and the most democratic of ancient democracies.[4] “The people of Athens,” says Bulwer, “were not, as in Sparta, the tools of the state—they were the state! In Athens the true blessing of freedom was rightly placed in the opinions and the soul. This unshackled liberty had its convulsions and its excesses, but it produced masterly philosophy, sublime poetry, and accomplished art with the energy and splendor of unexampled intelligence. Looking round us, more than four and twenty centuries after, in the establishment of the American Constitution, we yet behold the imperishable blessings which we derive from the liberties of Athens. Her life became extinct, but her soul transfused itself, immortal and immortalizing, throughout the world.”
Venice was another such oligarchy as Sparta—ruled by a small patrician “caste,” who chose an all-powerful Senate from their own number; and from the Senate was selected an Executive Council of Three—a name that has become proverbial for a body of secret and irresponsible tyrants. Venice’s strength was in commerce, in finance, as Sparta’s was in war. Her rich trade with the East and West made her seem
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.[5]
But her internal government was one long reign of terror. The Council of Three met at night, masked and robed in scarlet cloaks, to judge those against whom accusations had been thrust into the yawning “Lions’ Mouths”—two slots in the wall into which any might thrust an anonymous denunciation of his enemy. And from the Council’s sentence there was no hope of appeal; its victims were hurried across the Bridge of Sighs to vanish forever from human sight in the awful torture chambers to which that melancholy passage led.
The ending of most oligarchies has been a violent one, as was that of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, or that of the Decemviri at Rome. At Venice the sway of a “caste” lasted for centuries, and was ended only by a foreign conqueror—so complete an ascendency had the privileged patricians gained over the fettered populace. The wonderful mercantile prosperity of the community stifled the sentiment of popular liberty—a notable warning to mercantile and materialistic America!
No oligarchy, and nothing of oligarchic tendencies can be endured in this country. We must not and will not have a dominant “caste.”