Vindication of Natural Society Hogeye Condensed Version
page 17
  • The results of Athenian democracy:
























    "the People of this Republick banishing or murdering their best and ablest Citizens, dissipating the publick Treasure with the most senseless Extravagance..."


The Athenians made a very rapid Progress to the most enormous Excesses. The People under no Restraint soon grew dissolute, luxurious, and idle. They renounced all Labour, and began to subsist themselves from the publick Revenues. They lost all Concern for their common Honour or Safety, and could bear no Advice that tended to reform them. At this time Truth became offensive to those Lords the People, and most highly dangerous to the Speaker. The Orators no longer ascended the Rostrum, but to corrupt them further with the most fulsome Adulation. These Orators were all bribed by foreign Princes on the one Side or the other. And besides its own Parties, in this City there were Parties, and avowed ones too, for the Persians, Spartans, and Macedonians, supported each of them by one or more Demagogues pensioned and bribed to this iniquitous Service.

When you see the People of this Republick banishing or murdering their best and ablest Citizens, dissipating the publick Treasure with the most senseless Extravagance, and spending their whole Time, as Spectators or Actors, in playing, fiddling, dancing, and singing, does it not, my Lord, strike your Imagination with the Image of a sort of a complex Nero? And does it not strike you with the greater Horror, when you observe, not one Man only, but a whole City, grown drunk with Pride and Power, running with a Rage of Folly into the same mean and senseless Debauchery and Extravagance? But if this People resembled Nero in their Extravagance, much more did they resemble and even exceed him in Cruelty and Injustice.
ToAnarchPg Vindication of Natural Society