The inference is that both kinds of equality
should be employed; numerical in some cases, and proportionate in
others.
Still democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution
than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the
oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but
in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the
oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people
themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is
composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy
than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of
government.
II
In considering how dissensions and poltical revolutions arise, we
must first of all ascertain the beginnings and causes of them which
affect constitutions generally. They may be said to be three in
number; and we have now to give an outline of each. We want to know
(1) what is the feeling? (2) what are the motives of those who make
them? (3) whence arise political disturbances and quarrels? The
universal and chief cause of this revolutionary feeling has been
already mentioned; viz., the desire of equality, when men think that
they are equal to others who have more than themselves; or, again, the
desire of inequality and superiority, when conceiving themselves to be
superior they think that they have not more but the same or less
than their inferiors; pretensions which may and may not be just.
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