he Stoics held
in no esteem the institutions that vary with time and place, and their
ideal society resembled a universal Church more than an actual State. In
every collision between authority and conscience they preferred the
inner to the outer guide; and, in the words of Epictetus, regarded the
laws of the gods, not the wretched laws of the dead. Their doctrine of
equality, of fraternity, of humanity; their defence of individualism
against public authority; their repudiation of slavery, redeemed
democracy from the narrowness, the want of principle and of sympathy,
which are its reproach among the Greeks. In practical life they
preferred a mixed constitution to a purely popular government.
Chrysippus thought it impossible to please both gods and men; and Seneca
declared that the people is corrupt and incapable, and that nothing was
wanting, under Nero, to the fulness of liberty, except the possibility
of destroying it. But their lofty conception of freedom, as no
exceptional privilege but the birthright of mankind, survived in the law
of nations and purified the equity of Rome.

Whilst Dorian oligarchs and Macedonian kings crushed the liberties of
Greece, the Roman Republic was ruined, not by its enemies, for there was
no enemy it did not conquer, but by its own vices. It was free from many
causes of instability and dissolution that were active in Greece--the
eager quickness, the philosophic thought, the independent belief, the
pursuit of unsubstantial grace and beauty. It was protected by many
subtle contrivances against the sovereignty of numbers and against
legislation by surprise. Constitutional battles had to be fought over
and over again; and progress was so slow, that reforms were often voted
many years before they could be carried into effect. The authority
allowed to fathers, to masters, to creditors, was as incompatible with
the spirit of freedom as the practice of the servile East. The Roman
citizen revelled in the luxury of power; and his jealous dread of every
change that might impair its enjoyment portended a gloomy oligarchy. The
cause which transformed the domination of rigid and exclusive patricians
into the model Republic, and which out of the decomposed Republic built
up the archetype of all despotism, was the fact that the Roman
Commonwealth consisted of two States in one. The constitution was made
up of compromises between independent bodies, and the obligation of
observing contracts was the standi