From the point of view of a Punter - Politics or Football?

Montesquieu was a Historian/Philosopher who wrote extensively, and is himself observable to history. As such he can be blamed less than others for unlearned lessons from the mistakes of the Roman Empire; he documented them exhaustively in a lesser known tome "Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline."

Hardly a simple title, and a laborious read to the uninitiate, but instructive to those in history who wish to compare their own mistakes to the mistakes of the definitively Great. A few can learn from the mistakes of others before they derive them independently, but this (like Change,) is hard.

The following excerpt is from Chapter 4. Whatever he intended to write, he enumerated a commentary on campaigns.

Pyrrhus came to make war on the Romans at a time when they were in a position to resist him and to learn from his victories. He taught them to entrench, and to choose and arrange a camp. He accustomed them to elephants and prepared them for greater wars. Pyrrhus' greatness consisted only in his personal qualities.

1 Plutarch tells us that he was forced to undertake the Macedonian war because he could not support the eight thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry that he had.

2 This prince — ruler of a small state of which nothing was heard after him — was an adventurer who constantly undertook new enterprises because he could exist only while undertaking them. His allies, the Tarentines, had strayed far from the institutions of their ancestors,

3 the Lacedaemonians. He could have done great things with the Samnites, but the Romans had all but destroyed them. Having become rich sooner than Rome, Carthage had also been corrupted sooner. In Rome, public office could be obtained only through virtue, and brought with it no benefit other than honor and being preferred for further toils, while in Carthage everything the public could give to individuals was for sale, and all service rendered by individuals was paid for by the public.

The tyranny of a prince does no more to ruin a state than does indifference to the common good to ruin a republic. The advantage of a free state is that revenues are better administered in it. But what if they are more poorly administered? The advantage of a free state is that there are no favorites in it. But when that is not the case — when it is necessary to line the pockets of the friends and relatives, not of a prince, but of all those who participate in the government — all is lost. There is greater danger in the laws being evaded in a free state than in their being violated by a prince, for a prince is always the foremost citizen of his state, and has more interest in preserving it than anyone else.

The old morals, a certain custom favoring poverty, made fortunes at Rome nearly equal, but at Carthage individuals had the riches of kings. Of the two factions that ruled in Carthage, one always wanted peace, the other war, so that it was impossible there to enjoy the former or do well at the latter. While war at once united all interests in Rome, it separated them still further in Carthage.

4. In states governed by a prince, dissensions are easily pacified because he has in his hands a coercive power that brings the two parties together. But in a republic they are more durable, because the evil usually attacks the very power that could cure it. In Rome, governed by laws, the people allowed the senate to direct public affairs. In Carthage, governed by abuses, the people wanted to do everything themselves. Carthage, which made war against Roman poverty with its opulence, was at a disadvantage by that very fact. Gold and silver are exhausted, but virtue, constancy, strength and poverty never are.

The Romans were ambitious from pride, the Carthaginians from avarice; the Romans wanted to command, the Carthaginians to acquire. Constantly calculating receipts and expenses, the latter always made war without loving it.

Here we see flesh on the bones of the famous fragment from another work:

"Republics end through luxury; Monarchies through poverty."

This is the result of a failed search for the source of the observation: A Governmental System can survive ONLY SO LONG AS the people/public servants do not supplement their income from public monies. Failing even a mistaken attribution, I certify the idea is not original with me. I think Montesquieu has a better perspective than I do on a stimulus package just like President Bush 43's. Perhaps it's more like a blood transfusion - unavoidably imperative, but not a good process of which to make a casual practice.

Montesquieu was a veritable fount of helpful observations. I'll close with one that rebukes me personally:

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ - Montesquieu.