YOU DRAW AS TO THE FINAL DECLINE AND FALL, IF SUCH A THING IS EVER TO
BE, OF THIS REPUBLIC?
|TO the casual reader, the relationship that this question bears to
"Secrets of the Late Rebellion, now Revealed for the First Time,"
may seem very obscure, but to our mind, that sees the end from the
beginning, the relationship seems very close, as our readers will also
see, we think, before we close the answer.
Patrick Henry, in one of his outbursts of eloquence, said he "knew of no
way to judge of the future save by the past." Taking this as our guide,
let us inquire somewhat into the history of former republics, and see
if we cannot gather therefrom some probabilities as to the future of our
own, and some light by which to guide our own footsteps meanwhile. Our
plan and limited space will only permit us to take a bird's-eye view of
four--Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Rome--but even from these alone we may
learn some useful lessons.
The republic of Athens came into existence immediately after the
voluntary death of King Codrus, about 1068 years before Christ. Codrus
having been made to believe, through an oracle, that if he sacrificed
his own life, his country would be victorious over the Heraclidæ, with
whom they were then engaged in war, disguised himself as a peasant, and,
purposely quarrelling with a soldier of the hostile army, procured the
death he wished. His sons, Medon and Nileus, disputed the succession
to the crown; and the Athenians, taking advantage of this dispute,
determined to set aside the crown altogether, and thenceforth have
a representative or republican form of government. Hence arose the
Athenian Republic. Though they abolished the title of king, out of the
high regard they had for Codrus, they appointed his son Medon chief
magistrate for life, and even made the office hereditary, so that for
three hundred and thirty-one years thereafter the chief magistrate
continued in that family. They then abolished the perpetual archonship,
and made the tenure of the office ten years. This term they reduced
erelong to one year, and, instead of one archon or chief magistrate,
appointed nine, with equal authority. Meanwhile their government became
so purely democratic as to become utterly despotic, and the tyranny of
the mob was found to be more oppressive than the restraints of a
single ruler. Then followed the laws of Draco, which, because of
their severity, were said to have been "written in blood." He made
no distinction of offences, but punished all equally with death. He
weakened the authority of the Areopagus, and instituted a new tribunal,
in which judges were given almost unlimited power, and virtually made
brutes. The severity of his laws defeated their own object.
Such was the condition of things when the great lawmaker, Solon,
appeared on the stage, five hundred and ninety-four years before Christ.
The laws which he framed and gave the Athenians were not, as he said
himself, "the best possible, but the best which the Athenians were
capable of receiving." To the rich he gave offices and dignities; to the
poor he gave the right of suffrage, whereby in the framing of laws,
the election of magistrates, the making of war or peace, the forming
of treaties and alliances, and in all that regarded either religious or
civil policy, they should have an equal voice with the rich, and, being
much the greater in number, their class could overbalance the other
three, though out of their class could no nomination be made to any
office of honor or profit. A senate of four hundred members held an
intermediate place between office-holders and the people, and served as
a restraint upon both. The arbitrary power of the judges, as established
by Draco, Solon restrained, and made the court of Areopagus the chief
judicial tribunal, and gave it also a tutorial power over all the youth
of the republic. Instead of having an egotistical, half-educated state
school superintendent to do such duty (as sometimes found in this
country), this court appointed masters and governors for the youth, and
superintended their education. The Areopagus also inquired into the life
and morals of all who held offices in the state, and such as could not
stand the scrutiny were not only incapacitated for employ, but declared
infamous. His laws also prohibited all imprisonment for debt, and
contained many other provisions in which legislators have made no
improvement during the nearly two thousand five hundred years that have
passed since then.
Notwithstanding the good laws of Solon, then, as now, there were found
men to take advantage of their provisions to gratify their own
private hates. Thus, Solon's laws allowed popular action for most
offences--regarding all offences as against the "peace and dignity of
the state"--as we do now; but in many cases advantage was taken of this
by bad men to make the most calumnious accusations against men whose
character until then had stood even above suspicion. So advantage was
frequently taken of the law of ostracism (which was only meant for
good), whereby some of their very best men were banished from the
state. Thus, when an ignorant citizen was about to cast his vote for the
ostracism of Aristides, he was asked by Aristides himself, who chanced
to be passing by at the moment, and who was unknown t<\ him:
"Why, what harm, my friend, has Aristides done to you?"
"None in the world," replied he; "but I hate to hear everybody call him
the 'Just.'"
Thucydides also, from whom Athens had received the most eminent
services, was in like manner banished by ostracism; as likewise were
Miltiades, Cimon, Themistocles, Phocion, and many other of their most
eminent men. What was meant, too, for religious freedom was made to
subserve (by those who temporarily had the power) the purposes of
religious bigotry, tyranny, and persecution, until even the renowned
philosopher, Socrates, was made to drink the fatal hemlock.
While the great majority of Athenians were entirely satisfied with
their form of government; while the masses were equally jealous of their
liberty, because liberty was equally necessary to each for the enjoyment
of his favorite scheme of life; yet there were those inside of the
republic, as well as outside, who did not like a republican form of
government, and who were all the while watching for an opportunity
to overthrow it Among these was Pisistratus, a man of large wealth,
splendid talents, and of great popularity. He aspired to sovereign
power, and by his artifices came so near in obtaining it, that Solon,
disgusted at the want of patriotism among his countrymen, and unable
to witness its degradation, bade adieu to Athens, and died in voluntary
exile. He--even he, the great and good Solon--was made to feel what it
was to be "a man without a country," and chose to die in exile rather
than to remain in his native land, or even to look upon it again in a
state of degradation.. If the time should ever come (and God only knows
how soon it may come!) when not only one but scores, yea, hundreds, of
American Solons should be wandering throughout the world, without a home
and without a country, because of the destruction of our representative
form of government by European jealousy and Catholic bigotry, then, if
never before, they and all others will fully understand something of the
natural outgrowth of the Democratic party of this country, of which the
late rebellion was the first act in the drama, and of which its secret
workings only represented the machinations of a hundred Pisistratuses!
But though Pisistratus thus usurped power, and for a while played the
sovereign, he was unable to retain it long. Megacles and Lycurgus,
the chiefs of the Alemæonidæ, gained at length so much strength as
to attack and expel the usurper from Athens. By a stratagem he again
secured power, and, on dying, bequeathed the crown to his sons,
Hippias and Hipparchus, but erelong Hipparchus was killed, and Hippias
dethroned, and once again the republic prevailed, and statues were
erected to the honor of Harmodius and Aristogiton as the authors of
their country's deliverance from tyranny.
From thenceforth there was almost a constant warfare between the
political parties or factions of the republic, while jealous eyes
outside were consequently watching an opportunity for its destruction.
Ambitious demagogues were constantly using the people as their tools,
but scarcely would one obtain the chief magistracy until another would
pull him down--if not by a vote of the people, then by faction or by
assassination. Meanwhile Hippias, who had been dethroned, sought aid
from the king of Persia to reinstate him, and thus brought a long and
bloody war upon his own country. In this war were fought the renowned
battles of Marathon, Salamis, Plateæ, and Mycale, and the Greeks came
off victorious, but at a most fearful sacrifice of treasure and life.
After this followed the disunion among the several Grecian states--the
secession of some--the coldness and indifference of others; and though
the brilliant administrations of Cimon and Pericles seemed to revive the
republic for awhile, it was evident to all that the seeds of death were
fast germinating and would bring forth fruit erelong. The Persian king,
and the sovereigns of other surrounding countries, had long felt
deep jealousy of the Athenian Republic, and, when an excuse came for
attacking it, they were not backward in availing themselves of the
opportunity. Fortunately for the Athenian Republic the attack made upon
them by Persia had the effect to bring the whole power of the Spartan
Republic to their aid, which, with such other aid as they received from
minor states of Greece, enabled them to defeat the Persians in the end
and maintain their own independence.
But a worse fate awaited them--namely, a fight among themselves. The
mutual jealousies that had long existed between Athens and Sparta
broke out afresh, and soon terminated in an open war between the two
republics, and most of the minor states of Greece took a part in the
quarrel. The first declaration of hostilities, however, was compromised
before they came to actual conflict; but it proved to be only a
smouldering, and not an extinguishment, of the fire that had long burned
in the breast of each--a fire that afterwards broke forth in what was
known as the "Peloponnesian war," and lasted twenty-eight years. Our
plan and space will not permit any details of this. A history of the
first twenty-two years of the war was admirably written by Thucydides,
and of the last six years by Xenophon, to whom we must refer the reader
who would know its particulars. Suffice it to say here that during this
long internecine war each achieved victories and each suffered defeats.
At one time the Spartans so reduced Athens as to make an entire change
in its constitution. The republic was abolished and thirty governors,
or, as the Greek historians style them, "thirty tyrants" were
substituted, whose power seems to have been absolute, unless in so far
as each was restrained by the equally arbitrary will of his colleagues.
So fearful and terrible was their rule, that Xenophon thinks "a greater
number of Athenian citizens lost their lives by the sentence of these
tyrants, in the short space of eight months, than had fallen in the
whole twenty-eight years of the Peloponnesian war." Hundreds of the most
eminent of the Athenian families left their country in despair, and what
remained were for a time awed into silence, and dumb with consternation.
And just here we may pause to say that precisely the same kind of rule,
and the same kind of results, would have been witnessed in this country,
had the rebellion, by the aid of the Democratic party, succeeded in
capturing Washington and in establishing their rule over this country.
It is one of the "Secrets of the Late Rebellion, now Revealed for the
First Time" (and our information comes from one who was behind the
scenes and knew all about it, and the first sixteen chapters of this
volume entirely confirm this opinion), that behind President Davis and
behind General Lee stood a body of desperate men, who, at one single
sweep, would have wiped them off the chess-board and put others in their
stead, had they shown the least considerate humanity in dealing with
Northern men, in case the rebellion had succeeded. Not Abraham Lincoln
alone would have fallen at the hands of the assassin or hangman, but
thousands of others throughout the North would have suffered a like
fate, until the rule of the "thirty tyrants" in Athens would have been
considered but child's play in comparison with the rule of the more than
three hundred tyrants of this republic. Then would have been witnessed
here, as there, thousands of the most eminent of American
families leaving their country in despair--wandering they knew not
whither--without a home, and without a country! Abraham Lincoln's
assassination was indeed done by a half crazed Southern rebel; but who
can doubt, after reading the secrets revealed in the foregoing pages,
that the frenzy that fired Booth's brain, and the nerve that enabled him
to fire the deadly shot, came as directly from the Democratic party,
as a party, as that the pistol itself was purchased by a Democratic
partisan. All these facts go hand-in-hand, and there is no separating
one from the others.
But we have already occupied much more of time and space on the Athenian
Republic than we had intended. We can only say, in conclusion, that,
after the reign of the "thirty tyrants," its fortunes were up and
down--oftener down than up--until the battle of Chæronea, which occurred
in the year 338 before Christ, when the liberties of Greece were made
to yield finally and forever to the stronger arm of the Macedonian. The
Athenian Republic had existed after a fashion--and, indeed, much of the
time it was orderly "after a fashion"--for seven hundred and thirty years;
and when it fell, there was not so much as an empty shell left. Its
internal dissensions, more than anything else, had eaten out its vitals;
the jealousy of surrounding monarchies had been to it a constant source
of danger, and several times a source of great disaster; while for
fully one-half of the seven hun-dren and thirty years it was rather a
government of tyranny than of liberty to those who lived under it.
[Illustration: 0333]