more easy to create limitations by the use of force than by
persuasion.

The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle of government
standing alone is carried to excess and provokes a reaction. Monarchy
hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy
expands into the supremacy of numbers. They therefore imagined that to
restrain each element by combining it with the others would avert the
natural process of self-destruction, and endow the State with perpetual
youth. But this harmony of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy blended
together, which was the ideal of many writers, and which they supposed
to be exhibited by Sparta, by Carthage, and by Rome, was a chimera of
philosophers never realised by antiquity. At last Tacitus, wiser than
the rest, confessed that the mixed Constitution, however admirable in
theory, was difficult to establish and impossible to maintain. His
disheartening avowal is not disowned by later experience.

The experiment has been tried more often than I can tell, with a
combination of resources that were unknown to the ancients--with
Christianity, parliamentary government, and a free press. Yet there is
no example of such a balanced Constitution having lasted a century. If
it has succeeded anywhere it has been in our favoured country and in our
time; and we know not yet how long the wisdom of the nation will
preserve the equipoise. The Federal check was as familiar to the
ancients as the Constitutional. For the type of all their Republics was
the government of a city by its own inhabitants meeting in the public
place. An administration embracing many cities was known to them only in
the form of the oppression which Sparta exercised over the Messenians,
Athens over her Confederates, and Rome over Italy. The resources which,
in modern times, enabled a great people to govern itself through a
single centre did not exist. Equality could be preserved only by
Federalism; and it occurs more often amongst them than in the modern
world. If the distribution of power among the several parts of the State
is the most efficient restraint on monarchy, the distribution of power
among several States is the best check on democracy. By multiplying
centres of government and discussion it promotes the diffusion of
political knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent
opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities, and the consecration of
self-government. But although it m