The oscillation between democracy and aristocracy and back again, the repetition of exhausting discords, and the demoralizing influences of occasional despotism, so broke the spirit of each commonwealth that in the end the citizens forgot their ancient zeal for liberty, and were glad to accept tyranny for the sake of the protection it professed to extend to life and property.
To these vicissitudes all the republics of Italy, with the exception of Venice, were subject.

In like manner, they shared in common the belief that constitutions could be made at will, that the commonwealth was something plastic, capable of taking the complexion and the form impressed upon it by speculative politicians.

So firmly rooted was this conviction, and so highly self-conscious had the statesmen of Italy become, partly by the experience of their shifting history, and partly by their study of antiquity, that the idea of the State as something possessed of organic vitality can scarcely be said to have existed among them.

The principle of gradual growth, which gives its value, for example, to the English Constitution, was not recognized by the Italians.

Nor again had their past history taught them the necessity, so well defined and recognized by the Greek statesmen, of maintaining a fixed character at any cost in republics, which, in spite of their small scale, aspired to permanence.[1] The most violent and arbitrary changes which the speculative faculty of a theorist could contrive, or which the prejudices of a party could impose, seemed to them not only possible but natural.
[1] The value of the [Greek: _ethos_] was not wholly unrecognized by political theorists.