At the great assembly of the people, to which we now arrive, all freemen of the age of discretion, save only those branded by law with the opprobrium of atimos (unhonoured) [216], were admissible.

At the time of Solon, this assembly was by no means of the importance to which it afterward arose.

Its meetings were comparatively rare, and no doubt it seldom rejected the propositions of the Four Hundred.

But whenever different legislative assemblies exist, and popular control is once constitutionally acknowledged, it is in the nature of things that the more democratic assembly should absorb the main business of the more aristocratic.

A people are often enslaved by the accident of a despot, but almost ever gain upon the checks which the constitution is intended habitually to oppose.