It is not quite just to stigmatize the government of Elizabeth as a despotism, A despotism is a régime supported by military force, based on an army, with power to tax the people without their consent,like the old rule of the Caesars, like that of Louis XIV.

The Persian despotism is the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state.

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and controlled by the others.

The imperial despotism, whether brilliant or disgraceful, was a mournful retrograde step in civilization; it implied the extinction of patriotism and the general degradation of the people, and would have been impossible in the days of Cato, Scipio, or Metellus.

What a blow such a despotism would have been to science, literature, and philosophy!

Despotism within and conquest without, both being summed up in the one word Napoleonsuch was the fate of the Mother of Liberty, who had loved her child "not wisely but too well."

You may affirm that an absolute despotism is the only government fit for Dahomey, and I may not disallow it; but when you go on and say that Dahomey is the happiest country in the world, why, I refer you to Dogberry.

Despotism and fatality are perhaps the purely personal ideas that Mahomet gave to his political state, the latter encroaching, however, as most of his secular principles, upon the realm of philosophy.

Despotism is in our view a perpetual war of a few upon the many; and we must unlearn some of the earliest lessons that our mothers taught us and our fathers illustrated in their lives, before we can cease to sympathize with the assertors of their rights against the force or the fraud of their fellow-men.

Despotism, therefore, was the form best suited to Islam, and becomes its chief legacy to posterity, since without the religious sanction Islam politically could not exist.

Despotism is the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

Now if it be true that despotism is a continued attack upon mankind, then war comes from that quarter, and I have no where in the world heard that an unjust attack should not be opposed by a just defence.

And yet this despotism was the logical result of a generally accepted idea, instead of the idea being an outgrowth of the despotism, since the clergy, who controlled society by working on its fears, were themselves as complete victims and slaves as the people whom they led.