Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/372

320 at Rome, from the expulsion of the kings, though the people frequently proceeded to rude contumelious language, and sometimes so far as to pull and hale one another about the forum, yet no blood was ever drawn in any popular commotions, till the time of the Gracchi: however, I am of opinion, that the balance had begun many years before to lean to the popular side. But this default was corrected, partly by the principle just mentioned, of never drawing blood in a tumult; partly by the warlike genius of the people, which in those ages was almost perpetually employed; and partly by their great commanders, who, by the credit they had in their armies, fell into the scales as a farther counterpoise to the growing power of the people. Besides, Polybius, who lived in the time of Scipio Africanus the younger, had the same apprehensions of the continual encroachments made by the commons; and being a person of as great abilities, and as much sagacity, as any of his age, from observing the corruptions, which, he says, had already entered into the Roman constitution, did very nearly foretel what would be the issue of them. His words are very remarkable, and with little addition may be rendered to this purpose. "That those abuses and corruptions, which in time destroy a government, are sown along with the very seeds of it, and both grow up together; and that rust eats away iron, and worms devour wood, and both are a sort of plagues born and bred along with the substance they destroy; so with every form and scheme of government that man can invent, some vice or corruption creeps in with the very institution, which "grows