Others proved beyond all question that a tribunal which was particularly charged with the preservation of the State from danger could not always
1762.
do its work with the miserable tardiness of the other magistracies, and they recalled the many cases in which the Ten had saved Venice.
Rom. viii. 136-137.
One of the debates was prolonged for five consecutive hours. At last the Conservative party carried the day.
The wild enthusiasm of the population, on learning that the Ten and the Inquisitors were to remain in existence, shows well enough what the people thought; their only protection against the nobles lay in the two tribunals. Six thousand persons waited in the Square of Saint Mark’s to learn the result of the contest, and when it was known proceeded to burn fireworks before the palaces of the nobles who had been the chief speakers in defence of the Ten—Foscarini, Marcello, and Grimani. The populace then declared that it would set fire to the houses of the nobles who had tried to do away with the only institution they still feared, and the palaces of the Zen and the Renier were only saved from fire and pillage by the energetic intervention of the Inquisitors of State, whose office those aristocrats had attempted to abolish.
I know of no more convincing answer to the numerous dilettante historians who have accused the Council of Ten of oppressing the people.
If the Council and the Inquisitors were in need of an excuse for occasionally overstepping their powers in order to act quickly, they had a good one in the absurdly cumbrous system of the magistracies, as they existed in the eighteenth century. As a curiosity,
Rom. viii. 399.
I give a list or the principal magistracies, taken by Romanin from an almanack of 1796, the last year of the Republic:—