Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/164

150 is the central light of his philosophy; it penetrates to all points of his study, and on his part there is no apparent shrinking from the conclusions to which it shows the way. With every outward semblance of a nation, and a very powerful nation, Venice, after the closing of the Grand Council, or the limitation of the government to the powerful plutocrats who managed the matter, became simply a corporate enterprise, a trust, a monopoly, and was destined, like everything else that is unjust and selfish, to final defeat and ruin. The latest student of the condition is not deceived by any of the pretences of necessity which have imposed upon most of the earlier students. These may have had no friendlier feeling toward the oligarchy than he, but they have hardly recognized as he recognizes the fact that there was nothing in the situation of Venice, at the closing of the Grand Council, which compelled any patriotic spirit to acquiesce in that treacherous violation of the constitution. Outwardly Venice would have been as strong against her enemies under what survived of her ancient democratic forms as under the new authority of the usurpation, and Mr. McClellan clearly sees this. There was of course no inward weakness against which the oligarchy strengthened her. It has been generally supposed that the oligarchy preserved her from all sorts of domestic and foreign perils to which she would have succumbed but for its potent agency, but there is no proof of this in her history. The democracy made her great and glorious, and if she held her own under the oligarchy, it was with a finally failing grasp, which there is no reason and no evidence to suppose would have relaxed sooner under a popular government. She became a monopoly, a commercial enterprise, not so explicit or so barren of tradition as, for example, the East India Company, but with no more heart, and with no greater hold upon the real affections of her subjects. They were ready to die for the oligarchy, as they had been ready to die for the country of which the oligarchy had dispossessed them, but not so much because it was sweet, as because they found their account in it, or could not help themselves. San Marco was still synonymous with Venice, but San Marco had ceased to be the father of a country, and had become the president of a syndicate.

Mr. McClellan glances rapidly over the events which, with all their apparent success, weakened Venice one after another. The ideal of the syndicate was expansion, expansion on the Italian mainland, where it acquired large territories, and expansion in the Levant where it forced its way to commercial primacy when it could not force its way to political power. But the blood and treasure of the Venetian people were spent in continual wars, now with the Pope and his allies, and now with the Porte and his minions. On both hands the syndicate had to face treachery as well as violence, but it was fully qualified to play the game. It could command all talents: it had the people's money to pay them; and it was not afraid: courage is the one unquestionable virtue of an aristocracy. It bought mercenaries to fight its battles, and it knew how to deal with their captains when these favored its foes. It salaried and supported such a fearless mind as Paolo Sarpi, in his conflict with the Pope, and when the Church pronounced its interdicts of the republic, the syndicate ignored or defied them. It was a potent and perfect machine, but after all it was a machine, as Mr. McClellan calls it, and as he characterizes it when he does not call it so, and was not a country, not a nation.

It would have been interesting to have our author push his notion of the oligarchic machine to its logical conclusion on the parallel with our own party machines which offers itself to the reader's fancy. In our history we have seen more than once how a machine has consumed the vitality of a great and generous party, and it has always been the latent fear of certain patriots that some party machine may become so powerful as to consume the vitality of the people. This is what the Venetian machine did in the Venetian case, and its fatal and ruinous success is its lesson and warning. The machine, as one of its greatest masters and managers expressed, is always there for what there is in it, but when it has got that, there is nothing left, not even the machine itself. Mr. McClellan's perception of this fact in the