Rousseau_contrat-social

hastened corruption when once it had begun. The blood of Agis,
slaughtered by these tyrants, was avenged by his successor; the crime
and the punishment of the Ephors alike hastened the destruction of the
republic, and after Cleomenes Sparta ceased to be of any account. Rome
perished in the same way: the excessive power of the tribunes, which
they had usurped by degrees, finally served, with the help of laws made
to secure liberty, as a safeguard for the emperors who destroyed it. As
for the Venetian Council of Ten, it is a tribunal of blood, an object of
horror to patricians and people alike; and, so far from giving a lofty
protection to the laws, it does nothing, now they have become degraded,
but strike in the darkness blows of which no one dare take note.
The tribunate, like the government, grows weak as the number of its
members increases. When the tribunes of the Roman people, who first
numbered only two, and then five, wished to double that number, the
senate let them do so, in the confidence that it could use one to check
another, as indeed it afterwards freely did.
The best method of preventing usurpations by so formidable a body,
though no government has yet made use of it, would be not to make it
permanent, but to regulate the periods during which it should remain in
abeyance. These intervals, which should not be long enough to give
abuses time to grow strong, may be so fixed by law that they can easily
be shortened at need by extraordinary commissions.
This method seems to me to have no disadvantages, because, as I have
said, the tribunate, which forms no part of the constitution, can be
removed without the constitution being affected. It seems to be also
efficacious, because a newly restored magistrate starts not with the
power his predecessor exercised, but with that which the law allows him.
6. THE DICTATORSHIP
THE inflexibility of the laws, which prevents them from adapting
themselves to circumstances, may, in certain cases, render them
disastrous, and make them bring about, at a time of crisis, the ruin of
the State. The order and slowness of the forms they enjoin require a
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