Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/386

334 composed of men with all their infirmities about them, they have also the ill fortune to be generally led and influenced by the very worst among themselves, I mean, popular orators, tribunes, or, as they are now styled, great speakers, leading men, and the like. Whence it comes to pass, that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud, that ever lodged in the breast of any individual.

Again, in all free states the evil to be avoided is tyranny, that is to say, the summa imperii or unlimited power solely in the hands of the one, the few, or the many. Now, we have shown, that although most revolutions of government in Greece and Rome began with the tyranny of the people, yet they generally concluded in that of a single person; so that a usurping populace is its own dupe; a mere underworker, and a purchaser in trust for some single tyrant, whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an instinct, as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for beings of a superiour nature to their own. CHAP.