slaved, counted for nothing. There was no social union, no country to serve, no government to obey. Instead of a sovereign, there was a suzerain; instead of laws, there were pacts and treaties; instead of constitutions, there were charters; instead of courts of justice, there were peers in armor, and wager of battle.

The condition of the Netherlands, for example, illustrates most strikingly the tendency of the feudal spirit to pervade every interest and institution, and to keep them all separate and in conflict. The States General, controlled by the provincial states, the provincial states "cabined, cribbed, confined" by the municipal governments of the great towns, the towns themselves full of inferior corporations or guilds, animated by an esprit de corps of their own, submitting with reluctance to any general authority, and combining with difficulty in the pursuit of any common object. In short, the centralization complained of now-a-days in France, is a blessing of later times. When, after centuries of anarchy, the kings contrived to reduce so many independent and refractory authorities to obedience to the law, and to establish something like the order and unity of a well-constituted society, the vestiges of this original state of things continued, for a long time, plainly impressed upon all governments, and the spirit of the feud survived even the despotic policy of Richelieu. The political history of Europe, for eight centuries together, is, accordingly, most remarkable for its uniformity. The same ideas, the same maxims, the same conduct, every where; and nothing that deserves to be called either popular or revolutionary any where. An occasional Jacquerie, the perpetual hostilities between the cities and the neighboring barons, disputed successions, the crusades of all sorts against Mahometan or Christian miscreants, and even the civil and religious wars that grew out of the Reformation, constitute, really, no exception to the truth of our remark. They all had reference to existing institutions, and were addressed only to modify and improve them-none of them attacked the principle of prescription, or proclaimed original, inalienable, unalterable rights. The anabaptists in Germany, and the levellers in England, if they were not too contemptible in numbers and character to deserve notice in a general view of the progress of mankind, were, indeed, a sort of exception; but, surely, an exception that proves the rule, for all parties agreed, at least, in disavowing and detesting them and their

ravings, as inconsistent alike with sound principles and with social order; not to mention that these maniacs can scarcely be said to have given the dignity of a metaphysical system to their coarse fanaticism.

When French society had at length completely outgrown this artificial and forced system, and some, and even a very considerable change, was become unavoidable, it so happened, from a great variety of causes, that all the mighty agents of convulsion and decomposition were let loose at once, and swept in a moment every thing ancient or established from the face of the earth. Then, for the first time, the philosophers of modern Europe had an opportunity of witnessing one of those experiments in political chemistry which were continually occurring in the last days of Greece, as in a laboratory set apart for them. They saw society resolved into its elements, and these elements, like atoms in the void of Epicurus, disengaged, seeking, according to their affinities, new combinations, or too refractory to be reduced into any. They had opened the gates of Chaos, which, to shut, excelled their power, and,

Before their eyes in sudden view appeared
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place, were lost.

None of the Lycurguses of 1789 had the least idea of what was to ensue, and even when they dispersed in 1791, after so many signs in the heavens, and on the earth, of some great trouble at hand, and when the wisest of them had been brought to doubt the absolute perfection of their own work, they did not yet dream of the scenes of 1792, and still less of the reign of terror. To the genius of Burke alone, of those living men, the impending horrors were, from the first, revealed in all their gigantic shapes and dimensions of wo and wickedness, and nothing is better calculated to impress us with an idea of his immense superiority as a profound political thinker over all his contemporaries, than the familiarity with which he treats, in anticipation, an event so entirely new and anomalous in the history of modern nations. Where was he to seek in that history for the archetype of the Jacobin? What was there in the doings of Tell or Rienzi, or of

Artevelt and Massaniello, of Pym and Vane, to suggest the most distant idea of that exterminating fanaticism which possessed the minds of the conceited and reckless sophisters, the Robespierres and the St. Justs, who undertook to reconstitute French society upon metaphysical principles, and to regenerate the nations by a baptism of blood?

But what was then new and anomalous in Europe, is now becoming apace its settled opinion and its fundamental law. Every body that has eyes to see and ears to hear, must admit that democracy is the inevitable condition of modern nations. M. de Tocqueville is no discoverer-he has only uttered what all have long felt and thought. Paris is the capital of the democratic, no less than of the polite world; as much so and more than Athens ever was. The forms of royalty are, to a certain extent, kept up, but there is no reverence left for them. The little pageantry that still adorns the court, the hierarchy of the state, the magnificent equipage of its powers civil and military, are only what French taste requires as decorous and befitting the circumstances. Absolute equality before the law, and the spirit of equality in every thing, are the prominent characteristics of the times; and a theory of human rights and social powers, far more levelling than was ever known in Greece, has established itself in the laws of the state and in the opinions of the people. The same causes are producing the same tendencies every where, and whatever shape the universal democracy that is approaching may ultimately take, whether the republican or the monarchical, (for that is the great problem of society, and our recent experience is far from encouraging,) nothing seems to us surer, than that all institutions, bottomed upon distinctions of race or caste, will sooner or later, peaceably or by violence, fall before the progress of commerce and opinion.

It is quite natural, therefore, that with this conviction impressed upon their minds, people should look with more curiosity than formerly, into the history of states which grew up under circumstances, and assumed forms so totally different, from those of feudal Europe. It so happens, too, that the language in which the so-called democracy of Athens has perpetuated its principles and its glory, is by far the most perfect instrument of human thought ever vouchsafed to a people, and has been embalmed in eloquence and poetry entirely worthy of its own perfections. But these attractions, great as they undoubtedly are, are but subordinate to others more

immediately connected with the subject we are discussing. Heeren, after Heyne, has more than once adverted to the vast and diversified political experience of the Greeks. Syracuse, for instance, presents in its history alone, a complete compendium of governments, having passed through a greater number of revolutions, from one form of polity to another, through almost every combination of the social elements, than occurs in the annals of modern Europe. So every part of Greece proper, with the exception of some Dorian states, was in perpetual commotion, and is fully entitled to be called, as it is by the writer just mentioned, a "sample-paper of free commonwealths."* It was, therefore, quite a matter of course, that not only a wonderful degree of practical ability should be required by those who were called upon to act in such eventful and rapidly shifting scenes, but that the class of philosophers who, in later times, withdrew as much as possible from politics, to devote themselves to a life of contemplation, could not witness them without being led to reflect much and deeply upon the principles of civil society. Accordingly, this was universally the case. There is no feature in the intellectual history of the Greeks more remarkable, than the depth and comprehensiveness of their political speculations. Not Plato alone, but almost every philosopher of the many sects that sprung up out of the school of Socrates, published his thoughts upon the existing governments of his country, or built one of those castles in the air, called an "idea of a perfect commonwealth." It is, indeed, from such things, even more than from the events of Grecian story, or the conduct and the language of practical statesmen, that the political opinions of the better classes of society may be gathered. These dreams embody their desires, and show what would have been the shape of Greek legislation, had circumstances and the will of the mass of the people not been, as they every where are, too refractory to be controlled by speculative notions and artificial systems.

Mr. Hermann remarks, that "the treatises of the ancients themselves, on their manners, institutions, and governments, are, with the exception of a few fragments, wholly lost; but independently of the historians and orators, who form in their absence our chief authority, there is scarcely a writer of the

In dieser Griechischen Welt die gleichsam eine Muster-Charte freyer Staaten war. Ideen, etc. 3 Th. Europäische Völker, p. 327. cf. his Staaten des Alterthums III. Abschn. 2. Period.

better period of Greek literature, but contains numerous allusions to the public life of his times." That we have lost many treasures of information on these interesting subjects, is undeniable. The great work of Aristotle, in which he analvzed and censured the constitutions of the then civilized world in their endless variety, amounting, it is said, by some, to no less than two hundred and fifty, is no doubt, in some respects, though we must think rather subordinate ones, quite irreparable. The same thing may be said of Heraclides Ponticus, and others among his successors. Yet it is probable that the historian has lost more than the philosopher, and the curious philosopher more than the statesman, or the man of the world, in those works. The resources left us for any practically useful purpose are, at any rate, most abundant. If we have lost Aristotle's collection or analysis of Polities, we have the rife fruit of a life of profound thought and extensive observation, in his Philosophy of Politics. Heraclides Ponticus, from the age in which he lived, and still more from a passage in Cicero,‡ we take to have been a writer of inferior value, inasmuch as a mere speculative and scholastic one, who flourished in a period when Greek genius and spirit were already on the decline. If, before that period, authors who treated of politics in a theoretical or systematic form, were but few, this deficiency is amply made up, not only by the historians and orators, as Mr. Hermann has it, but by all the writers of all sorts, who are come down to us from the most brilliant era of those immortal commonwealths; the interval between the Persian and the Peloponnesian, and thence down to the Lamian war. The truth is, that the literature, like the life (of which it was the faithful mirror) of Greece, was thoroughly political. Its great predominant peculiarity is its strictly historical complexion, even in things where it might be suspected of being, or might be expected to be, most fictitious and fanciful. Their tragedies, for instance, were full of politics, those of Euripides especially. The Old Comedy is a part, and by no means an unimportant one, of the constitutional history of Athens, and Timanthes did not paint the Demus more to the life than Aristophanes. Pindar is vouched by Müller and others, to prove that Lycurgus did no more

* Νόμιμα, or Πολιτείαι Πόλεων.

+ Πολιτικα.

Ad Quint. Fratr. III. 5.

§ Orest. 696, 772. Suppl. 400, sqq.