executive officer a General elected for one year, with powers similar to
those of an American President. In each the supreme assembly was a
primary assembly at which every citizen from every city of the league
had a right to be present, to speak, and to vote; but as a natural
consequence these assemblies shrank into comparatively aristocratic
bodies. In Ætolia, which was a group of mountain cantons similar to
Switzerland, the federal union was more complete than in Achaia, which
was a group of cities. In Achaia cases occurred in which a single city
was allowed to deal separately with foreign powers. Here, as in earlier
Greek history, the instinct of autonomy was too powerful to admit of
complete federation. Yet the career of the Achaian League was not an
inglorious one. For nearly a century and a half it gave the Peloponnesos
a larger measure of orderly government than the country had ever known
before, without infringing upon local liberties. It defied successfully
the threats and assaults of Macedonia, and yielded at last only to the
all-conquering might of Rome.

Thus in so far as Greece contributed anything towards the formation of
great and pacific political aggregates, she did it through attempts at
_federation_. But in so low a state of political development as that
which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean world in pre-Christian
times, the more barbarous method of _conquest with incorporation_ was
more likely to be successful on a great scale. This was well illustrated
in the history of Rome,--a civic community of the same generic type with
Sparta and Athens, but presenting specific differences of the highest
importance. The beginnings of Rome, unfortunately, are prehistoric. I
have often thought that if some beneficent fairy could grant us the
power of somewhere raising the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the
earliest ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no place from which
the historian should be more glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the