Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/313

ATHENS AFTEU TEE RESTORATION. 291 exiles ; which a fortunate change of sentiment, on the pa.rt of Pausanias, and the leading members of the Peloponnesian con- federacy, ultimately crowned with success. After such years of misery, it was an unspeakable relief to the Athenian population to regain possession of Athens and Attica, to exchange their domestic tyrants for a renovated demo- cratical government, and to see their foreign enemies not merely evacuate the country, but even bind themselves by treaty to future friendly dealing. In respect of power, indeed, Athens was but the shadow of her former self. She had no empire, no tribute, no fleet, no fortifications at Peiraus, no long walls, not a single fortified place in Attica except the city itself. Of all these losses, however, the Athenians probably made little account, at least at the first epoch of their reestablishment ; so intolerable was the pressure which they had just escaped, and so welcome the restitution of comfort, security, property, and independence, at home. The very excess of tyranny committed by the Thirty gave a peculiar zest to the recovery of the democ- racy. In their hands, the oligarchical principle, to borrow an expression from Air. Burke, 1 " had produced in fact, and instantly, the grossest of those evils with which it was pregnant in its nature ; " realizing the promise of that plain-spoken oligarchical 1 " I confess, gentlemen, that this appears to me as bad in the principle, and far worse in the consequences, than an universal suspension of tho Habeas Corpus Act Far from softening the features of such a principle, and thereby removing any part of the popular odium or natural terrors attending it, I should be sorry tJiat anything framed in contradiction to tJie spirit of our constitution did not instantly produce, in fact, the grossest of th evils with which it was pregnant in its nature. It is by lying dormant a long time, or being at first very rarely exercised, that arbitrary power steals upon a people. On the next unconstitutional act, all the fashionable world will be ready to say : Your prophecies are ridiculous, your fears arc vain ; you see how little of the misfortunes which you formerly foreboded is come to pass. Thus, by degrees, that artful softening of all arbitrary power, the alleged infrcqucncy or narrow extent of its operation, will be received as a sort of aphorism ; and Mr. Hume will not be singular in telling us that the fclk'ity of mankind is no more disturbed by it, than by earthquakes or thunder, or the other more unusual accidents of nature." (Burke, Letter to the Sheriff's of Bristol, 1777: Burke's "Works, vol. iii, pp. JiG-150 oct. edit.)