wisdom of Gods, then all this would have been well:  if with a greater knowledge of what is good for the people, they had as great a care for their interest as they have themselves, if they were seated above the world, sympathizing with the welfare, but not feeling the passions of men, receiving neither good nor hurt from them, but bestowing their benefits as free gifts on them, they might then rule over them like another Providence.  But this is not the case.  Coriolanus is unwilling that the senate should show their ‘cares’ for the people, lest their ‘cares’ should be construed into ‘fears’, to the subversion of all due authority; and he is no sooner disappointed in his schemes to deprive the people not only of the cares of the state, but of all power to redress themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to exclaim: 

     Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,
     And occupations perish.

This is but natural:  it is but natural for a mother to have more regard for her son than for a whole city; but then the city should be left to take some care of itself.  The care of the state cannot, we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of high life.  The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy.  Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of our weakness; their riches of our poverty; their pride of our degradation; their splendour of our wretchedness; their tyranny of our servitude.  If they had the superior knowledge ascribed to them (which they have not) it would only render them so much more formidable; and from Gods would convert them into Devils.  The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.  The people are poor; therefore they ought to be starved.  They are slaves; therefore they ought to be beaten.  They work hard; therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden.  They are ignorant; therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable.  This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate:  to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes.  The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetical justice; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.  We may depend upon it that what men delight to read in books, they will put in practice in reality.