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should be elected, and questions of public policy be determined, in
assemblies of the people.

It must be understood, however, by the reader, that a republic, as
contemplated and intended by Otanes in this speech, was entirely
different from the mode of government which that word denotes at the
present day. They had little idea, in those times, of the principle of
representation, by which the thousand separate and detached
communities of a great empire can choose _delegates_, who are to
deliberate, speak, and act for them in the assemblies where the great
governmental decisions are ultimately made. By this principle of
representation, the people can really all share in the exercise of
power. Without it they can not, for it is impossible that the people
of a great state can ever be brought together in one assembly; nor,
even if it were practicable to bring them thus together, would it be
possible for such a concourse to deliberate or act. The action of any
assembly which goes beyond a very few hundred in numbers, is always,
in fact, the action exclusively of the small knot of leaders who call
and manage it. Otanes, therefore, as well as all other advocates of
republican government in ancient times, meant that the supreme power
should be exercised, not by the great mass of the people included
within the jurisdiction in question, but by such a portion of certain
privileged classes as could be brought together in the capital. It was
such a sort of republic as would be formed in this country if the
affairs of the country at large, and the municipal and domestic
institutions of all the states, were regulated and controlled by laws
enacted, and by governors appointed, at great municipal meetings held
in the city of New York.

This was, in fact, the nature of all the republics of ancient times.
They were generally small, and the city in whose free citizens the
supreme power resided, constituted by far the most important portion
of the body politic. The Roman republic, however, became at one period
very large. It overspread almost the whole of Europe; but, widely
extended as it was in territory, and comprising innumerable states
and kingdoms within its jurisdiction, the vast concentration of power
by which the whole was governed, vested entirely and exclusively in
noisy and tumultuous assemblies convened in the Roman forum.

Even if the idea of a representative system of government, such as is
adopted in modern times, and