If parties in a republic are necessary to secure a degree of vigilance
sufficient to keep the public functionaries within the bounds of law and
duty, at that point their usefulness ends. Beyond that they become
destructive of public virtue, the parent of a spirit antagonist to that
of liberty, and eventually its inevitable conqueror. We have examples of
republics where the love of country and of liberty at one time were the
dominant passions of the whole mass of citizens, and yet, with the
continuance of the name and forms of free government, not a vestige of
these qualities remaining in the bosoms of any one of its citizens. It
was the beautiful remark of a distinguished English writer that "in the
Roman senate Octavius had a party and Antony a party, but the
Commonwealth had none." Yet the senate continued to meet in the temple
of liberty to talk of the sacredness and beauty of the Commonwealth and
gaze at the statues of the elder Brutus and of the Curtii and Decii, and
the people assembled in the forum, not, as in the days of Camillus and
the Scipios, to cast their free votes for annual magistrates or pass
upon the acts of the senate, but to receive from the hands of the
leaders of the respective parties their share of the spoils and to shout
for one or the other, as those collected in Gaul or Egypt and the lesser
Asia would furnish the larger dividend.
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