Moreover, in many oligarchies there are laws against
making money in trade. But at Carthage, which is a democracy. there is
no such prohibition; and yet to this day the Carthaginians have
never had a revolution. It is absurd too for him to say that an
oligarchy is two cities, one of the rich, and the other of the poor.
Is not this just as much the case in the Spartan constitution, or in
any other in which either all do not possess equal property, or all
are not equally good men? Nobody need be any poorer than he was
before, and yet the oligarchy may change an the same into a democracy,
if the poor form the majority; and a democracy may change into an
oligarchy, if the wealthy class are stronger than the people, and
the one are energetic, the other indifferent. Once more, although
the causes of the change are very numerous, he mentions only one,
which is, that the citizens become poor through dissipation and
debt, as though he thought that all, or the majority of them, were
originally rich. This is not true: though it is true that when any
of the leaders lose their property they are ripe for revolution;
but, when anybody else, it is no great matter, and an oligarchy does
not even then more often pass into a democracy than into any other
form of government. Again, if men are deprived of the honors of state,
and are wronged, and insulted, they make revolutions, and change forms
of government, even although they have not wasted their substance
because they might do what they liked- of which extravagance he
declares excessive freedom to be the cause.
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