s indiscriminate
reverence, it descends below the stature of mental manhood. It is fit
to be great only in little things. It acts a treachery upon itself, and
suffocates the sensations that urge the detection.

Though the ancient governments present to us a miserable picture of the
condition of man, there is one which above all others exempts itself
from the general description. I mean the democracy of the Athenians. We
see more to admire, and less to condemn, in that great, extraordinary
people, than in anything which history affords.

Mr. Burke is so little acquainted with constituent principles of
government, that he confounds democracy and representation together.
Representation was a thing unknown in the ancient democracies. In those
the mass of the people met and enacted laws (grammatically speaking) in
the first person. Simple democracy was no other than the common hall of
the ancients. It signifies the form, as well as the public principle of
the government. As those democracies increased in population, and the
territory extended, the simple democratical form became unwieldy and
impracticable; and as the system of representation was not known, the
consequence was, they either degenerated convulsively into monarchies,
or became absorbed into such as then existed. Had the system of
representation been then understood, as it now is, there is no reason
to believe that those forms of government, now called monarchical or
aristocratical, would ever have taken place. It was the want of
some method to consolidate the parts of society, after it became too
populous, and too extensive for the simple democratical form, and also
the lax and solitary condition of shepherds and herdsmen in other parts
of the world, that afforded opportunities to those unnatural modes of
government to begin.

As it is necessary to clear away the rubbish of errors, into which the
subject of government has been thrown, I will proceed to remark on some
others.

It has always been the political craft of courtiers and
court-governments, to abuse something which they called republicanism;
but what republicanism was, or is, they never attempt to explain. Let us
examine a little into this case.

The only forms of government are the democratical, the aristocratical,
the monarchical, and what is now called the representative.

What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It
is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter o