and unrestrained censure of those very authorities
as to all their public acts,--combined, too, with the perfect
confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of
party contest, that the forms of the constitution will not be less
sacred in the eyes of his opponents than in his own. This
co-existence of freedom and self-imposed restraint--of obedience to
authority with unmeasured censure of the persons exercising it--may
be found in the aristocracy of England, (since about 1688,) as well
as in the democracy of the American United States; and, because we
are familiar with it, we are apt to suppose it a natural sentiment;
though there seem to be few sentiments more difficult to establish
and diffuse among a community, judging by the experience of
history. We may see how imperfectly it exists, at this day, in the
Swiss cantons; and the many violences of the French Revolution
illustrate, amongst various other lessons, the fatal effects
arising from its absence, even among a people high in the scale of
intelligence. Yet the diffusion of such constitutional morality,
not merely among the majority of any community, but throughout the
whole, is the indispensable condition of a government at once free
and peaceable; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may
render the working of free institutions impracticable, without
being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves."--Vol.
iv. p. 205.

Then follow, close on the extract we have just made, some observations
upon the famous law of Ostracism, which are well deserving of attention,
and which we would willingly quote did our space allow of it. Perhaps it
would be difficult, in following out the several applications of this
law, to show that it had exactly the beneficial operation which--arguing
on the theory of the institution,--is here assigned to it. But, at the
very lowest, this much may be said of the law of Ostracism, that it
gives to the stronger of two factions a means of deciding the contest
without appeal to force, before the contest rose to its maximum of
bitterness, and without necessity or excuse for those wholesale
banishments which afflicted the republics of Italy. If such an
institution had existed in the Florentine republic, we should not have
heard of those cruel banishments that Guelph and Ghibelline, Bianchi and
Neri, infli