The Bravo (21 page)

"I doubt, Jacopo, after all, if I get from them the freedom of the
boy."

"Speak them fair, and say naught to wound their self-esteem, or to
menace their authority—they will pardon much, if the last, in
particular, be respected."

"But it is that authority which has taken away my child! Can I speak in
favor of the power which I know to be unjust?"

"Thou must feign it, or thy suit will fail."

"I will go back to the Lagunes, good Jacopo, for this tongue of mine
hath ever moved at the bidding of the heart. I fear I am too old to say
that a son may righteously be torn from the father by violence. Tell
them, thou, from me, that I came thus far, in order to do them respect,
but that, seeing the hopelessness of beseeching further, I have gone to
my nets, and to my prayers to blessed St. Anthony."

As he ceased speaking, Antonio wrung the hand of his motionless
companion, and turned away, as if to retire. Two halberds fell to the
level of his breast ere his foot had quitted the marble floor, and he
now saw, for the first time, that armed men crossed his passage, and
that, in truth, he was a prisoner. Nature had endowed the fisherman with
a quick and just perception, and long habit had given great steadiness
to his nerves. When he perceived his real situation, instead of entering
into useless remonstrance, or in any manner betraying alarm, he again
turned to Jacopo with an air of patience and resignation.

"It must be that the illustrious Signore wish to do me justice," he
said, smoothing the remnant of his hair, as men of his class prepare
themselves for the presence of their superiors, "and it would not be
decent in an humble fisherman to refuse them the opportunity. It would
be better, however, if there were less force used here in Venice, in a
matter of simple right and wrong. But the great love to show their
power, and the weak must submit."

"We shall see!" answered Jacopo, who had manifested no emotion during
the abortive attempt of the other to retire.

A profound stillness succeeded. The halberdiers maintained their rigid
attitudes within the shadow of the wall, looking like two insensible
statues in the attire and armor of the age, while Jacopo and his
companion occupied the centre of the room with scarcely more of the
appearance of consciousness and animation. It may be well to explain
here to the reader some of the peculiar machinery of the State, in the
country of which we write, and which is connected with the scene that is
about to follow: for the name of a Republic, a word which, if it mean
anything, strictly implies the representation and supremacy of the
general interests, but which has so frequently been prostituted to the
protection and monopolies of privileged classes, may have induced him to
believe that there was at least a resemblance between the outlines of
that government, and the more just, because more popular, institutions
of his own country.

In an age when rulers were profane enough to assert, and the ruled weak
enough to allow, that the right of a man to govern his fellows was a
direct gift from God, a departure from the bold and selfish principle,
though it were only in profession, was thought sufficient to give a
character of freedom and common sense to the polity of a nation. This
belief is not without some justification, since it establishes in
theory, at least, the foundations of government on a base sufficiently
different from that which supposes all power to be the property of one,
and that one to be the representative of the faultless and omnipotent
Ruler of the Universe. With the first of these principles we have
nothing to do, except it be to add that there are propositions so
inherently false that they only require to be fairly stated to produce
their own refutation; but our subject necessarily draws us into a short
digression on the errors of the second as they existed in Venice.

It is probable that when the patricians of St. Mark created a community
of political rights in their own body, they believed their State had
done all that was necessary to merit the high and generous title it
assumed. They had innovated on a generally received principle, and they
cannot claim the distinction of being either the first or the last who
have imagined that to take the incipient steps in political improvement
is at once to reach the goal of perfection. Venice had no doctrine of
divine right, and as her prince was little more than a pageant, she
boldly laid claim to be called a Republic. She believed that a
representation of the most prominent and brilliant interests in society
was the paramount object of government, and faithful to the seductive
but dangerous error, she mistook to the last, collective power for
social happiness.

It may be taken as a governing principle, in all civil relations, that
the strong will grow stronger and the feeble more weak, until the first
become unfit to rule or the last unable to endure. In this important
truth is contained the secret of the downfall of all those states which
have crumbled beneath the weight of their own abuses. It teaches the
necessity of widening the foundations of society until the base shall
have a breadth capable of securing the just representation of every
interest, without which the social machine is liable to interruption
from its own movement, and eventually to destruction from its own
excesses.

Venice, though ambitious and tenacious of the name of a republic, was,
in truth, a narrow, a vulgar, and an exceedingly heartless oligarchy. To
the former title she had no other claim than her denial of the naked
principle already mentioned, while her practice is liable to the
reproach of the two latter, in the unmanly and narrow character of its
exclusion, in every act of her foreign policy, and in every measure of
her internal police. An aristocracy must ever want the high personal
feeling which often tempers despotism by the qualities of the chief or
the generous and human impulses of a popular rule. It has the merit of
substituting things for men, it is true, but unhappily it substitutes
the things of a few men for those of the whole. It partakes, and it
always has partaken, though necessarily tempered by circumstances and
the opinions of different ages, of the selfishness of all corporations
in which the responsibility of the individual, while his acts are
professedly submitted to the temporizing expedients of a collective
interest, is lost in the subdivision of numbers. At the period of which
we write, Italy had several of these self-styled commonwealths, in not
one of which, however, was there ever a fair and just confiding of power
to the body of the people, though perhaps there is not one that has not
been cited sooner or later in proof of the inability of man to govern
himself! In order to demonstrate the fallacy of a reasoning which is so
fond of predicting the downfall of our own liberal system, supported by
examples drawn from transatlantic states of the middle ages, it is
necessary only to recount here a little in detail the forms in which
power was obtained and exercised in the most important of them all.

Distinctions in rank, as separated entirely from the will of the nation,
formed the basis of Venetian polity. Authority, though divided, was not
less a birthright than in those governments in which it was openly
avowed to be a dispensation of Providence. The patrician order had its
high and exclusive privileges, which were guarded and maintained with a
most selfish and engrossing spirit. He who was not born to govern, had
little hope of ever entering into the possession of his natural rights:
while he who was, by the intervention of chance, might wield a power of
the most fearful and despotic character. At a certain age all of
senatorial rank (for, by a specious fallacy, nobility did not take its
usual appellations) were admitted into the councils of the nation. The
names of the leading families were inscribed in a register, which was
well entitled the "Golden Book," and he who enjoyed the envied
distinction of having an ancestor thus enrolled could, with a few
exceptions (such as that named in the case of Don Camillo), present
himself in the senate and lay claim to the honors of the "Horned
Bonnet." Neither our limits nor our object will permit a digression of
sufficient length to point out the whole of the leading features of a
system so vicious, and which was, perhaps, only rendered tolerable to
those it governed by the extraneous contributions of captured and
subsidiary provinces, of which in truth, as in all cases of metropolitan
rule, the oppression weighed most grievously. The reader will at once
see that the very reason why the despotism of the self-styled Republic
was tolerable to its own citizens was but another cause of its eventual
destruction.

As the senate became too numerous to conduct with sufficient secresy and
dispatch the affairs of a state that pursued a policy alike tortuous and
complicated, the most general of its important interests were intrusted
to a council composed of three hundred of its members. In order to avoid
the publicity and delay of a body large even as this, a second selection
was made, which was known as the Council of Ten, and to which much of
the executive power that aristocratical jealousy withheld from the
titular chief of the state, was confided. To this point the political
economy of the Venetian Republic, however faulty, had at least some
merit for simplicity and frankness. The ostensible agents of the
administration were known, and though all real responsibility to the
nation was lost in the superior influence and narrow policy of the
patricians, the rulers could not entirely escape from the odium that
public opinion might attach to their unjust or illegal proceedings. But
a state whose prosperity was chiefly founded on the contribution and
support of dependants, and whose existence was equally menaced by its
own false principles, and by the growth of other and neighboring
powers, had need of a still more efficient body in the absence of that
executive which its own Republican pretensions denied to Venice. A
political inquisition, which came in time to be one of the most fearful
engines of police ever known, was the consequence. An authority as
irresponsible as it was absolute, was periodically confided to another
and still smaller body, which met and exercised its despotic and secret
functions under the name of the Council of Three. The choice of these
temporary rulers was decided by lot, and in a manner that prevented the
result from being known to any but to their own number and to a few of
the most confidential of the more permanent officers of the government.
Thus there existed at all times in the heart of Venice a mysterious and
despotic power that was wielded by men who moved in society unknown, and
apparently surrounded by all the ordinary charities of life; but which,
in truth, was influenced by a set of political maxims that were perhaps
as ruthless, as tyrannic, and as selfish, as ever were invented by the
evil ingenuity of man. It was, in short, a power that could only be
intrusted, without abuse, to infallible virtue and infinite
intelligence, using the terms in a sense limited by human means; and yet
it was here confided to men whose title was founded on the double
accident of birth, and the colors of balls, and by whom it was wielded
without even the check of publicity.

The Council of Three met in secret, ordinarily issued its decrees
without communicating with any other body, and had them enforced with a
fearfulness of mystery, and a suddenness of execution, that resembled
the blows of fate. The Doge himself was not superior to its authority,
nor protected from its decisions, while it has been known that one of
the privileged three has been denounced by his companions. There is
still in existence a long list of the state maxims which this secret
tribunal recognised as its rule of conduct, and it is not saying too
much to affirm, that they set at defiance every other consideration but
expediency,—all the recognised laws of God, and every principle of
justice, which is esteemed among men. The advances of the human
intellect, supported by the means of publicity, may temper the exercise
of a similar irresponsible power, in our own age; but in no country has
this substitution of a soulless corporation for an elective
representation, been made, in which a system of rule has not been
established, that sets at naught the laws of natural justice and the
rights of the citizen. Any pretension to the contrary, by placing
profession in opposition to practice, is only adding hypocrisy to
usurpation.

It appears to be an unavoidable general consequence that abuses should
follow, when power is exercised by a permanent and irresponsible body,
from whom there is no appeal. When this power is secretly exercised, the
abuses become still more grave. It is also worthy of remark, that in the
nations which submit, or have submitted, to these undue and dangerous
influences, the pretensions to justice and generosity are of the most
exaggerated character; for while the fearless democrat vents his
personal complaints aloud, and the voice of the subject of professed
despotism is smothered entirely, necessity itself dictates to the
oligarchist the policy of seemliness, as one of the conditions of his
own safety. Thus Venice prided herself on the justice of St. Mark, and
few states maintained a greater show or put forth a more lofty claim to
the possession of the sacred quality, than that whose real maxims of
government were veiled in a mystery that even the loose morality of the
age exacted.

"A power that if but named
In casual converse, be it where it might,
The speaker lowered at once his voice, his eyes,
And pointed upward as at God in heaven."
ROGERS.

The reader has probably anticipated, that Antonio was now standing in an
antechamber of the secret and stern tribunal described in the preceding
chapter. In common with all of his class, the fisherman had a vague idea
of the existence, and of the attributes, of the council before which he
was to appear; but his simple apprehension was far from comprehending
the extent or the nature of functions that equally took cognizance of
the most important interests of the Republic, and of the more trifling
concerns of a patrician family. While conjectures on the probable result
of the expected interview were passing through his mind, an inner door
opened, and an attendant signed for Jacopo to advance.