THE OSTRACISM. 155 fusion of such constitutional morality, not merely among the ma- jority of any community, but throughout the whole, is the indis- pensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable ; since even any powerful and obstinate minority may render the working of free institutions impracticable, without being strong enough to conquer ascendency for themselves. Nothing less than unanimity, or so overwhelming a majority as to be tanta- mount to unanimity, on the cardinal point of respecting constitu- tional forms, even by those who do not wholly approve of them, can render the excitement of political passion bloodless, and yet expose all the authorities in the state to the full license of pacific criticism. At the epoch of Kleisthenes, which by a remarkable coinci deuce is the same as that of the regifuge at Rome, such constitu tional morality, if it existed anywhere else, had certainly no place at Athens ; and the first creation of it in any particular society must be esteemed an interesting historical fact. By the spirit of his reforms, equal, popular, and comprehensive, far beyond the previous experience of Athenians, he secured the hearty attachment of the body of citizens ; but from the first generation of leading men, under the nascent democracy, and with such precedents as they had to look back upon, no self-im- posed limits to ambition could be expected : and the problem re- quired was to eliminate beforehand any one about to transgress these limits, so as to escape the necessity of putting him down afterwards, with all that bloodshed and reaction, in the midst of which the free working of the constitution would be suspended at least, if not irrevocably extinguished. To acquire such influ- ence as would render him dangerous under democratical forms, a man must stand in evidence before the public, so as to afford some reasonable means of judging of his character and purposes ; and the security which Kleisthenes provided, was, to call in the positive judgment of the citizens respecting his future promise purely and simply, so that they might not remain too long neu- tral between two formidable political rivals, pursuant in a cer- tain way to the Solonian proclamation against neutrality in a sedition, as I have already remarked in a former chapter. He incorporated in the constitution itself the principle of privilegium (to employ the Roman phrase, which signifies, not a peculiar
