the space of each experiment. So that Mr. Adams's very language is new and strange to us. He talks perpetually of the aristocratick and democratick interest. An use for this computation will be the era of those calamities, which have constantly attended it; and of the application of Mr. Adams's precedents.
To the regularity of the phenomena, reducing; these conclusions to moral certainties, for the sake of those who love authority, we will subjoin one of an eminent English author. Russell, in his Modern Europe, observes, "But an equal counterpoise of power, which among foreign nations is the source of tranquility, proves always the cause of quarrel among domestick factions."[1] This counter-poise of power, among three domestick factions, is the only basis of Mr. Adams's hopes; if he should succeed, it is, says Russell, a constant prelude to a warfare between these counterpoised factions; if he fails, Mr. Adams acknowledges, that the predominant faction becomes a tyrant. Was it the accomplishment of the counterpoise in Mr. Adams's numerous cases, which regularly produced Russell's consequence?
Had a balance of power, among orders or factions, caused tranquillity, its absence would have caused broils and tumult. Tranquillity is one of the phenomena, arising from the unbalanced sovereignty of a single order; and broil and tumult are phenomena, which have ever attended a division of power among orders. Democracy was quiet under the feudal aristocracy, the church estates under the popes, the plebeians under the late government of Venice, and the peers of England are quiet under patronage, paper and armies. But whenever an equipoise of power, or an approach towards it has existed, as among the Grecian states, at Rome, among the Italian republicks, and formerly in England between the king and the nobility, civil war and bloodshed ensued.
- ↑ Modern Europe, vol. 2, p. 410.
