heaven which were opened. Isaac Vossius denies the universality of the deluge: "Hoc est piè nugari." Calmet maintains it; informing us, that bodies have no weight in air, but in consequence of their being compressed by air. Calmet was not much of a natural philosopher, and the weight of the air has nothing to do with the deluge. Let us content ourselves with reading and respecting every thing in the bible, without comprehending a single word of it.

I do not comprehend how God created a race of men in order to drown them, and then substitute in their room a race still viler than the first.

How seven pairs of all kinds of clean animals should come from the four quarters of the globe, together with two pairs of unclean ones, without the wolves devouring the sheep on the way, or the kites the pigeons, &c &c.

How eight persons could keep in order, feed, and water, such an immense number of inmates, shut up in an ark for nearly two years; for, after the cessation of the deluge, it would be necessary to have food for all these passengers for another year, in consequence of the herbage being so scanty.

I am not like M. Pelletier. I admire every thing, and explain nothing.

DEMOCRACY.

Le pire des états, c'est l'état populaire.

That sway is worst, in which the people rule.

Such is the opinion which Cinna gave Augustus.† But on the other hand Maximus maintains, that

Le pire des états, c'est l'état monarchique.
That sway is worst, in which a monarch rules.

Bayle, in his Philosophical Dictionary, after having repeatedly advocated both sides of the question, gives,

Commentary on Genesis, p. 197, &c.

+ Corn. Cinna, act ii. scene 1.

under the article Pericles, a most disgusting picture of democracy, and more particularly that of Athens.

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A republican, who is a stanch partisan of democracy, and one of our proposers of questions," sends us his refutation of Bayle and his apology for Athens. We will adduce his reasons. It is the privilege of every writer to judge the living and the dead; he who thus sits in judgment will be himself judged by others, who in their turn will be judged also; and thus from age to age all sentences are, according to circumstances, reversed or reformed.

Bayle, then, after some common-place observations, uses these words: "A man would look in vain into the history of Macedon for as much tyranny as he finds in the history of Athens."

Perhaps Bayle was discontented with Holland when he thus wrote; and probably my republican friend, who refutes him, is contented with his little democratic city" for the present."

It is difficult to weigh, in an exquisitely nice balance, the iniquities of the republic of Athens and of the court of Macedon. We still upbraid the Athenians with the banishment of Cymon, Aristides, Themistocles, and Alcibiades, and the sentences of death upon Phocion and Socrates; sentences similar in absurdity and cruelty to those of some of our own tribunals.

In short, what we can never pardon in the Athenians is the execution of their six victorious generals, condemned because they had not time to bury their dead after the victory, and because they were prevented from doing so by a tempest. This sentence is at once so ridiculous and barbarous, it bears such a stamp of superstition and ingratitude, that those of the inquisition, those delivered against Urbain Grandier, against the wife of marshal D'Ancre, against Montrin, and against innumerable sorcerers and witches, &c. are not, in fact, fooleries more atrocious.

It is in vain to say, in excuse of the Athenians, that they believed, like Homer before them, that the souls

of the dead were always wandering, unless they had received the honours of sepulture or burning. A folly is no excuse for a barbarity.

A dreadful evil, indeed, for the souls of a few Greeks to ramble for a week or two on the shores of the ocean! The evil is in consigning over living men to the executioner; living men who have won a battle for you; living men, to whom you ought to be devoutly grateful.

Thus, then, are the Athenians convicted of having been at once the most silly and the most barbarous judges in the world.

But we must now place in the balance the crimes of the court of Macedon; we shall see that that court far exceeds Athens in point of tyranny and atrocity.

There is ordinarily no comparison to be made between the crimes of the great, who are always ambitious, and those of the people, who never desire, and who never can desire, any thing but liberty and equality. These two sentiments, "liberty and equality," do not necessarily lead to calumny, rapine, assassination, poisoning, and devastation of the lands of neighbours; but the towering ambition and thirst for power of the great, precipitate them headlong into every species of crime in all periods and in all places.

In this same Macedon, the virtue of which Bayle opposes to that of Athens, we see nothing but a tissue of tremendous crimes for a series of two hundred years.

It is Ptolemy, the uncle of Alexander the Great, who assassinates his brother Alexander to usurp the kingdom.

It is Philip, his brother, who spends his life in guilt and perjury, and ends it by a stab from Pausanius.

Olympias orders queen Cleopatra and her son to be thrown into a furnace of molten brass. She assassinates Arideus.

Antigonus assassinates Eumenes.

Antigonus Gonathas, his son, poisons the governor of the citadel of Corinth, marries his widow, expels her, and takes possession of the citadel.

Philip, his grandson, poisons Demetrius, and defiles the whole of Macedon with murders.

Perseus kills his wife with his own hand, and poisons his brother.

These perfidies and cruelties are authenticated in history.

Thus, then, for two centuries, the madness of despotism converts Macedon into a theatre for every crime; and in the same space of time you see the popular government of Athens stained only by five or six acts of judicial iniquity, five or six certainly atrocious judgments, of which the people in every instance repented, and for which they made, as far as they could, honourable expiation (amende honorable). They asked pardon of Socrates after his death, and erected to his memory the small temple called Socrateion. They asked pardon of Phocion, and raised a statue to his honour. They asked pardon of the six generals, so ridiculously condemned and so basely executed. They confined in chains the principal accuser, who with difficulty escaped from public vengeance. The Athenian people, therefore, appear to have had good natural dispositions, connected as they were with great versatility and frivolity. In what despotic state has the injustice of precipitate decrees ever been thus ingenuously acknowledged and deplored?

Bayle, then, is for this once in the wrong. My republican has reason on his side. Popular government, therefore, is in itself less iniquitous and less abominable than monarchical despotism.*

The great vice of democracy is certainly not tyranny

Voltaire has stated the fact very fairly: the crimes and injustice of democracy are incidental and acute; those of monarchies, chronical and unavoidable. As to the great bugbear of the French revolution, it has nothing to do with the question.A sudden change from one kind of government to another, must always be disorderly. When we hear of the injustice and anarchy of democracies, from the partisans of despotism, we are uniformly reminded of the dialogue between the two North Britons in Dr. Moore's Zeluco. "If a Scotsman happen to get hanged in England, what gihing and jeering at his country.

and cruelty. There have been republicans in mountainous regions wild and ferocious; but they were made so, not by the spirit of republicanism, but by nature. The North American savages were entirely republican; but they were republics of bears.

The radical vice of a civilised republic is expressed by the Turkish fable of the dragon with many heads, and the dragon with many tails. The multitude of heads become injurious, and the multitude of tails obey one single head, which wants to devour all.

Democracy seems to suit only a very small country; and even that fortunately situated.* Small as it may be, it will commit many faults, because it will be composed of men. Discord will prevail in it, as in a convent of monks; but there will be no St. Bartholomews there, no Irish massacre, no Sicilian vespers, no inquisition, no condemnation to the galleys for having taken water from the ocean without paying for it; at least, unless it be a republic of devils, established in some corner of hell.

After having taken the side of my Swiss friend against the dextrous fencing-master, Bayle, I will add : That the Athenians were warriors like the Swiss, and as polite as the Parisians were under Louis XIV.

That they excelled in every art requiring genius or execution, like the Florentines in time of the MediciThat they were the masters of the Romans in the sciences and in eloquence, even in the days of CiceroThat this same people, insignificant in number, who

men," says one of the parties; "but if the same misfortune befal an Englishman, nothing is said of it." "No to be sure," continues his companion, "that is an affair of course." In a similar manner, the eternal oppression, disorder, and bloodshed incidental to absolute monarchy, are never thought upon in the midst of the most abundant horror of similar iniquity in republics. The comparison between Athens and Macedon is well put; and it would puzzle a Mitford to find an adequate reply to it.-T.

Happily the United States of America seem likely to controvert this proposition. It has been already remarked, that the genuine theory of representation only began to be widely studied in the days of Voltaire.-T.