position in the world, is a mournful spectacle indeed. And the book
which sets before us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the innumerable
petty misunderstandings and contemptible jealousies which brought about
this direful result, is one of the most mournful of books.

We may console ourselves, however, for the premature overthrow of the
power of Athens, by the reflection that that power rested upon political
conditions which could not in any case have been permanent or even
long-enduring. The entire political system of ancient Greece, based as
it was upon the idea of the sovereign independence of each single city,
was one which could not fail sooner or later to exhaust itself through
chronic anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent
federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we
might call "incorporation and assimilation," after the Roman fashion.
But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with
brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a
disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered
about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any
large or general scale. Schemes of federal union were put into
operation, though too late to be of avail against the assaults of
Macedonia and Rome. But as for the principle of representation, that
seems to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind; no statesman of
antiquity, either in Greece or at Rome, seems to have conceived the idea
of a city sending delegates armed with plenary powers to represent its
interests in a general legislative assembly. To the Greek statesmen, no
doubt, this too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity of the
sovereign city.

This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent
the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible