Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/372

 364 work of man is perishable, and must for ever have inherent elements of decay. Nay, it must perish, if there be not that vital spirit in the people, which alone can nourish, sustain, and direct all its movements. It is in vain, that statesmen shall form plans of government, in which the beauty and harmony of a republic shall be embodied in visible order, shall be built up on solid substructions, and adorned by every useful ornament, if the inhabitants suffer the silent power of time to dilapidate its walls, or crumble its massy supporters into dust; if the assaults from without are never resisted, and the rottenness and mining from within are never guarded against. Who can preserve the rights and liberties of the people, when they shall be abandoned by themselves? Who shall keep watch in the temple, when the watchmen sleep at their posts? Who shall call upon the people to redeem their possessions, and revive the republic, when their own hands have deliberately and corruptly surrendered them to the oppressor, and have built the prisons, or dug the graves of their own friends? Aristotle, in ancient times, upon a large survey of the republics of former days, and of the facile manner, in which they had been made the instruments of their own destruction, felt himself compelled to the melancholy reflection, which has been painfully repeated by one of the greatest statesmen of modern times, that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. "The ethical character," says he, is the same; both exercise despotism over the better class of citizens; and the decrees are in the one, what ordinances and arrets are in the other. The demagogue, too, and the court favourite are not unfrequently the same identical men, and always hear a close analogy. And these have the principal power, each in their