to the councils of the nation. The
names of the leading families were inscribed in a register, which was
well entitled the "Golden Book," and he who enjoyed the envied
distinction of having an ancestor thus enrolled could, with a few
exceptions (such as that named in the case of Don Camillo), present
himself in the senate and lay claim to the honors of the "Horned
Bonnet." Neither our limits nor our object will permit a digression of
sufficient length to point out the whole of the leading features of a
system so vicious, and which was, perhaps, only rendered tolerable to
those it governed by the extraneous contributions of captured and
subsidiary provinces, of which in truth, as in all cases of metropolitan
rule, the oppression weighed most grievously. The reader will at once
see that the very reason why the despotism of the self-styled Republic
was tolerable to its own citizens was but another cause of its eventual
destruction.

As the senate became too numerous to conduct with sufficient secresy and
dispatch the affairs of a state that pursued a policy alike tortuous and
complicated, the most general of its important interests were intrusted
to a council composed of three hundred of its members. In order to avoid
the publicity and delay of a body large even as this, a second selection
was made, which was known as the Council of Ten, and to which much of
the executive power that aristocratical jealousy withheld from the
titular chief of the state, was confided. To this point the political
economy of the Venetian Republic, however faulty, had at least some
merit for simplicity and frankness. The ostensible agents of the
administration were known, and though all real responsibility to the
nation was lost in the superior influence and narrow policy of the
patricians, the rulers could not entirely escape from the odium that
public opinion might attach to their unjust or illegal proceedings. But
a state whose prosperity was chiefly founded on the contribution and
support of dependants, and whose existence was equally menaced by its
own false principles, and by the growth of other and neighboring
powers, had need of a still more efficient body in the absence of that
executive which its own Republican pretensions denied to Venice. A
political inquisition, which came in time to be one of the most fearful
engines of police ever known, was the consequence. An authority as
irresponsible as it was absolute, was periodically confid