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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: is insecure. Plato had pointed out before how the extreme liberty
of a democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius analyses
the law and shows the scientific principles on which it rests.
The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an
important era in the philosophy of history. Its special
applicability to the politics of our own day has been illustrated
in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French state had lost
those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocracy and
moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only
barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences
against the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the [Greek
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