|HAVING more than consumed the space allotted for this volume, we have neither room nor time left in which to write of the Roman Republic as its importance demands, and as indeed we should gladly have written. And yet we confess there is not, or ought not to be, any necessity for adding another word. If the lessons taught us from what we have learned of the three preceding republics have not opened our eyes to the dangerous tendencies of the Democratic party as a party; if we are not already convinced that the leaders of that party, and those who stand behind the scenes to prompt the leaders and furnish them with the "sinews of war," in the shape of European gold, have for their ultimate object the setting aside of our representative form of government and the destruction of the liberty of our press, then we would not be convinced though one arose from the dead.
Why, then, need we add a word about the founding of the Roman Republic, five hundred and ten years before Christ; why tell of the law, then for the first time enacted by the Senate, that any citizen who had been condemned to death by a magistrate, or even to banishment, or corporal punishment, should have the right of an appeal to the people before the sentence went into effect; why tell of the wars in which the republic was thenceforth engaged, and how gloriously the people sustained the honor of the republic; why tell how the people were afterwards betrayed by their rulers, and made to suffer the most intolerable hardships until they obtained the privilege of electing tribunes; why tell of the struggles that these tribunes of the people had with rulers chosen by the aristocracy for many, many years in maintaining for the people the rights for which they had made immense sacrifice of life, and which they valued so highly; why tell--as it would take an entire volume to tell--how corruptions crept, from time to time, into the heart of the republic, how ambition took the place of patriotism, how the leaders in the provinces were watching with jealous eyes those at Rome and vice versa, how Caesar finally "passed the Rubicon," how he seized the government, how he attempted to put on a crown, and in the attempt lost both the crown and his life; and how, when great Caesar fell, fell the republic, with a crash that was heard to the uttermost ends of the earth? If we were to tell all this with the precision of a Montesquieu, or with as much display of learning as an Abbé de Vertot, there could only be gathered therefrom precisely the same lessons as we have already learned from the rise, progress, decline, and downfall of the three Grecian republics.