hundred millions of inhabitants; but do they bear well in mind that the
requisition upon the individual is augmented by every multiplication
and extension of the mass? It is not without significance, that great
empires have uniformly been, or become, despotisms. Liberty lives only
in the life of just principle; and as the weight of an elephant could
not be sustained by the skeleton of a gazelle,--as, moreover, the bones
must be made stouter as well as longer,--so must a vast body politic be
permeated by a sturdier element of justice than is required for a
diminutive state. It is, indeed, the chief recommendation of our
federative form of government, that this, so far as may be, localizes
legislation, and thus, by lessening the number of interests that demand
a national consent, lessens equally the strain upon the conscience and
judgment of the whole. Near at hand, the mere good feeling of
neighbors, the companionable sentiment of cities and clans, proves a
valuable succedaneum for that deeper principle which is good for all
places and times. But this sentiment, like gravitation, diminishes in
the ratio of the square of the distance, and at any considerable remove
can no longer be reckoned upon as a counter-balance to the lawlessness
of egotism. Athenians could be passably just, or at least not
disastrously unjust, to Athenians; Spartans to Spartans; but Sparta
must needs oppress the other cities of Laconia, while Athens was at
best a fickle ally; and when Grecian liberty could be strong only in
Grecian union, the common sentiment was bankrupted by too great a draft
upon its resources. How far beyond the range of egotism of neighborhood
a _free_ state may go is determined chiefly by limits in the souls of
its constituents. At that point where equal justice begins to halt,
fatigued by too long a journey, the inevitable boundaries of the state
are fixed. Nor is it the mere sentiment of justice alone that suffices;
but this must be sustained in its applications by a certain breadth of
nature, a certain freedom and flexibility, akin to the dramatic