Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

The system of self-government thus introduced, as the natural fruit of the elements out of which it arose, would be a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with a decided predominance of the former element at starting, but with a gradually increasing momentum on the side of the inferior factor in proportion as the mass of the people excluded from aristocratic privileges by a necessary law of social growth advanced in numbers and in social importance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens and Rome, present to us here two types from which important lessons may be learned. In both the discarding of the kings was the work of the aristocracy; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, and a more characteristic manhood; whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy than a pure democracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both States the aristocratic element did not submit to the necessary curtailment of its power without a struggle; but in Athens the names of Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked the early formation of a democracy almost totally purged from any remnant of aristocratic influence, at an epoch in its development corresponding to which we find Rome pursuing her system of worldwide conquest under a system of compromise between the patrician and the plebeian element, similar in some sort to what we see before our eyes at the present moment in our own country. To Athens, therefore, we look, in the first place, for an answer to the question, What does history teach in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we may safely say that, under favourable circumstances, there is no form of government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as a pure democracy. Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing, the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent and civic efficiency in the greatest number of capable individuals; but it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed by any other form of government, it is therefore absolutely the best of all forms of government. All that we are warranted to say is, as Cornewall Lewis does,9 that without a strong admixture of the democratic spirit humanity in its social form cannot achieve its highest results; of which truth, indeed, we have the most striking proof before our eyes in our own happy island, where, even before the time which Mr. Green happily designates as Puritan England, powerful kings had received a lesson that as they had been elected so they might be dismissed from office by the voice of London burghers. Neither, on the other hand, does it follow from the shortness of the bright reign of Athenian democracy—not more than 200 years from Clisthenes to the Macedonians—that all democracies are short-lived, and must pay, like dissipated young gentlemen, with premature decay for the feverish abuse of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the power of what we may call a sort of Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, instead of being weakened as it was by Aristides and Pericles, had been built up according to the idea of Æschylus and the intelligent aristocrats of his day, such a body, armed, like our House of Lords, with an effective negative on all outbursts of popular rashness, might have prevented the ambition of the Athenians from launching on that famous Syracusan expedition which exhausted their force and maimed their action for the future. But the lesson taught by the short-lived glory of Athens, and its subjugation under the rough foot of the astute Macedonian, is not that democracies, under the influence of faction, and, it may be, not free from venality, will sell their liberties to a strong neighbour—for aristocratic Poland did this in a much more blushless way than democratic Greece—but that any loose aggregate of independent States, given more to quarrel amongst themselves than to unite against a common enemy, whether democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical in their form of government, cannot in the long run maintain their ground against the firm policy and the well-massed force of a strong monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the map of free peoples at Chæronea, not because the Athenian people had too much freedom, but because the Greek States had too little unity. They were used by Philip exactly in the same way that Napoleon used the German States at the commencement of the present century. Divide et infera is the politician’s most familiar maxim, which, when wisely and persistently applied, whether by an ancient Macedonia or a modern Russia, will always give a strong monarchy a decided advantage over every other form of government. Surround me with a belt of petty principalities, says the despot, however highly civilised and however well governed, and I shall know to make them play my game and work themselves into confusion, till the hour comes when I may appear as a god to allay by my intervention the troubles which I have fostered by my intrigues.