Page:Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories Vol.5 (1907).djvu/42

 scene and time of Heyse's "Andrea Delfin" are alike tragic. Venice was rarely a peaceful community in its early glory. But the years from 1750 on until nearly the close of the century saw the very blackest period. The Queen of the Seas had become a community torn by petty internal strife and jealousies.

Unsuccessful war had robbed the proud Republic of many of her possessions. Aggression from without could not be combated by a people harassed by tyranny within. Individual initiative was killed by despotism, industry and commerce suffered in consequence, and life in Venice offered nothing but the opportunity for political intrigue or private and public debauchery.

The Great Council, that splendid machinery of government, instituted in the early days of the Republic to secure the power to the Sovereign People forever, had come to be only an instrument in the hands of the nobility, helpless itself to control its own creature, the Council of Ten. This smaller council, at first merely a committee of the Great Council, chosen to act on certain special cases of urgency, had become the true seat of power, and with its own appointed committee, the Three Inquisitors of State, ruled Venice absolutely.

The Three Inquisitors were the final judges, and the mystery which surrounded their actions, their very persons even, made their rule a complete despotic tyranny, responsible to no one, sparing no one. No citizen of Venice was safe from interference in his most private affairs; open murder and secret assassination were the order of the day. The strife of the nobility among themselves rent the city asunder. A party of the older families, prominent since the earliest days of Venetian history, had been ousted from power by a younger faction which had captured the Council of Ten. They still held seats in the Great Council, but where powerless to control the Ten. Their jealousy broke out in constant petty rebellions which sharpened the tyranny of the Ten, and an era of oppression that would have done credit to the most despotic form of monarchy brooded over the nation calling itself a Republic. The absorption of power and wealth in the hands of the few meant poverty and loss of energy for the many, and the death knell of Venetian independence had sounded.—.