But a worse fate awaited them--namely, a fight among themselves. The mutual jealousies that had long existed between Athens and Sparta broke out afresh, and soon terminated in an open war between the two republics, and most of the minor states of Greece took a part in the quarrel. The first declaration of hostilities, however, was compromised before they came to actual conflict; but it proved to be only a smouldering, and not an extinguishment, of the fire that had long burned in the breast of each--a fire that afterwards broke forth in what was known as the "Peloponnesian war," and lasted twenty-eight years. Our plan and space will not permit any details of this. A history of the first twenty-two years of the war was admirably written by Thucydides, and of the last six years by Xenophon, to whom we must refer the reader who would know its particulars. Suffice it to say here that during this long internecine war each achieved victories and each suffered defeats. At one time the Spartans so reduced Athens as to make an entire change in its constitution. The republic was abolished and thirty governors, or, as the Greek historians style them, "thirty tyrants" were substituted, whose power seems to have been absolute, unless in so far as each was restrained by the equally arbitrary will of his colleagues. So fearful and terrible was their rule, that Xenophon thinks "a greater number of Athenian citizens lost their lives by the sentence of these tyrants, in the short space of eight months, than had fallen in the whole twenty-eight years of the Peloponnesian war." Hundreds of the most eminent of the Athenian families left their country in despair, and what remained were for a time awed into silence, and dumb with consternation.
And just here we may pause to say that precisely the same kind of rule, and the same kind of results, would have been witnessed in this country, had the rebellion, by the aid of the Democratic party, succeeded in capturing Washington and in establishing their rule over this country. It is one of the "Secrets of the Late Rebellion, now Revealed for the First Time" (and our information comes from one who was behind the scenes and knew all about it, and the first sixteen chapters of this volume entirely confirm this opinion), that behind President Davis and behind General Lee stood a body of desperate men, who, at one single sweep, would have wiped them off the chess-board and put others in their stead, had they shown the least considerate humanity in dealing with Northern men, in case the rebellion had succeeded. Not Abraham Lincoln alone would have fallen at the hands of the assassin or hangman, but thousands of others throughout the North would have suffered a like fate, until the rule of the "thirty tyrants" in Athens would have been considered but child's play in comparison with the rule of the more than three hundred tyrants of this republic. Then would have been witnessed here, as there, thousands of the most eminent of American families leaving their country in despair--wandering they knew not whither--without a home, and without a country! Abraham Lincoln's assassination was indeed done by a half crazed Southern rebel; but who can doubt, after reading the secrets revealed in the foregoing pages, that the frenzy that fired Booth's brain, and the nerve that enabled him to fire the deadly shot, came as directly from the Democratic party, as a party, as that the pistol itself was purchased by a Democratic partisan. All these facts go hand-in-hand, and there is no separating one from the others.