ions of this remark have the history of France
during the Revolution, and of England during the Reform mania
afforded! And this affords an illustration of a truth, which, the more
history is studied, will be rendered more apparent, viz., that the
principles which lie at the bottom of the greatest changes in the
political world, and produce the most devastating evils to society,
are in reality the same which we see acting every day around us in
common life. In the jealousies of the tea-table, the animosities of
the market-place, the envy of trade, we may see the passions working,
which, infused into a whole people, tear society in pieces. It is only
supposing the same malevolent or selfish desires working in every
breast, directed against one object, and rendered irresistible from
that very multiplication, and we have the envy of the coterie
transformed into the fury of revolution. Whoever will closely observe
the working of that mainspring of human actions--selfishness--on the
society, whether in a village, a city, a country, or a metropolis in
which he resides, will have no difficulty in discerning the real but
secret, and therefore unobserved spring of the greatest changes that
ever occur in the political and social world. Voltaire said the
factions at Geneva were storms in a teacup; if any man will study the
motion of water in a teacup, he will be at no loss to understand the
hurricanes of the Atlantic.

On the division of the Roman people into centuries and tribes, which
was the cardinal point of their constitution, Montesquieu makes the
following important observation:--

"Servius Tullius was the author of the famous division of the
people into centuries, which Livy and Dionysius Halicarnassus
have so well described. He distributed an hundred and
ninety-three centuries into six classes, and put the whole lower
people into the last century, which singly formed the sixth
class. It is easy to see that that arrangement virtually excluded
the lower classes from the suffrage, not _de jure_, but _de
facto_. Subsequently it was agreed, that except in some
particular cases they should, in voting, follow the division into
tribes. There were thirty-five of these tribes who gave each
their vote: _four were from the city, thirty-one from the
country_. The principal citizens, being all rural proprietors,
were naturally classed in the country tribes: the lower peo