Although the age of Pericles was the age of glory to Greece, yet it was then, as Pliny remarks, that Greece lost her freedom; for then she lost her virtue, and with it her love of art. Shall we not heed the admonitory teaching of an eminent classic historian,* when he affirms that the occasion of the Peloponnesian war-the direst civil calamity that befel Greece-was the alleged mutual rupture of the thirty years' league between Athens and Lacedæmon; but that the true cause was, the jealousy of the latter at the growing superiority of Athens. Intestine feuds are the most implacable and deadly in their influence and effects, and therefore most sedulously to be guarded against in a confederacy of free States. A spirit of rivalry or jealousy, resulting from differences of opinion and local interest, are among the evils to which they are exposed. The vaulting ambition of Pericles for territorial acquisitions, is an illustration of this. Webster, referring to Greece, observes: "Political science seems never to have extended to their contemplation of a system, which should be adequate to the government of a great nation upon principles of liberty. They were accustomed only to the contemplation of small republics, and were led to consider an augmented population as incompatible with free institutions." They sought to erect systems of more perfect civil liberty, but the light of the moral and mental world of their time was not to be compared with that when our forefathers did the same. The Peloponnesian war was succeeded by those protracted disasters and civil commotions which tended to reduce and exhaust the Greeks, and to destroy that bond of union once the palladium of their strength and glory. It was at this crisis that Philip of Macedon, taking advantage of their disorder, made himself master of all Greece, by his conquest at Charonea. Grecian history has been presented in three aspects: that of Themistocles, in which the statesman was subordinate to the general; that of Pericles, in which the general was subordinate to the statesman; and that of Demosthenes, in which the statesman acted indeThucydides. pendently of the general. The first is distinguished by its love of military glory; the last, by its marvellous displays of Grecian eloquence-for it was the age of the ten famous Athenian orators: "Those ancients, whose resistless eloquence Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne."* The golden age of Grecian heroism, art, and eloquence, was from the era of Solon to that of Alexander. From the reign of Alexander to the extinction of taste in design and excellence in execution, not a single name is recorded worthy of note, as meriting comparison with the masters of the Grecian republic. The same applies with equal force to the Augustan age of Rome. Homer's great epic was designed to exhibit the ill effects of division in a confederate power. Virgil, on the contrary, flattered the oppressor of his country's liberty, in his adulation of Augustus. It is evident, therefore, that political liberty may consist with the culture of the arts. Even the rugged Spartans delighted, for a time, to embody and perpetuate their heroic achievements, by the chisel of Bathycles; and the sacred inclosure of Amycle is no less memorable as the depository of the earliest creations of Grecian sculpture. It has been said there are few who, if asked in which of the States of antiquity they would choose their own lot to have been cast, would not name Athens-since nowhere was there so much good, because nowhere was there so much freedom. Yet that freedom was constantly jeopardized, both by oligarchical conspirators, and by the tyranny of the sovereign people. The glories of Marathon and Salamis are obscured when we remember that the same victories which rescued the Athenian freeman but riveted the fetters of the Athenian bondsman. These two factions destroyed her greatest man, Socrates. The altar of Athenian liberty is overthrown, and its ashes poured out, because it burnt with alien fires. Grecian polity differed from that of * Milton. our own times. It was far less expansive and comprehensive, pertaining merely to cities, rather than States or territories. We possess little in common with the politics of the ancient free States. Their circumstances were widely dissimilar to ours, while theirs was a pagan and ours a Christian faith. Nor can the virtues or the vices of their age excite any other than a philosophic interest. Yet, allowing for this difference of circumstances and condition, there is exhibited much that is suggestive and admonitory to be gleaned for the advantage of modern times. Chenevix observes: "It was in Greece that mankind began the new career which had a much greater affinity to true civilization than any condition of society that could have been previously conceived. It would be unjust to say that Asia, though luxurious, was not civilized; but the characteristics of civilization in that continent were so weak as to give but little tincture to the general mind. In Greece, the best mode of social progress became predominant, and may be traced in every province of thought, as sensuality gave place to intellect, and men found that the powers and faculties of each might be useful to the whole community." The great conservative principle or characteristic of civilization, as opposed to luxury, is combination, the conviction that more may be obtained by unity of design and concert of action, than by the divided wills of multitudes, however numerous. He continues: "The difficulties which the Greeks had to overcome sufficiently taught this lesson, and turned their social career into the path of true civilization. It was thus that they became the parents of European advancement, and that the legacies which they have bequeathed remain at this day among its richest treasures. "Since the independence of the United States, the North Americans principally followed the path which had been traced out by their British forefathers; and they were induced to continue in it because they had many difficulties to oppose. But those difficulties, as in ancient Greece, bespoke abundance more than poverty; and promised such easy fertility and greatness, that it may be questioned, notwith standing the remembrance of past examples, whether civilization or luxury will finally predominate. But this much may safely be conjectured: Should the social improvement of the United States terminate in luxury, their luxury, like their vanity, will be much more European than Asiatic."* Another authority remarks that history abounds in proofs that almost all the good which nations have possessed is to be attributed to social progress; nearly all the evil, to luxury. "It was by the corruption of civilization and the ascendency of luxury, that the fall of Greece was caused, that the armies which had triumphed under the banners of intellect, were defeated when summoned away from their pleasures. It was because the influence of Lycurgus over the small republic of his birth had banished from it all the means of sensuality, that the power of Sparta, her domestic tranquillity, her good order and virtues, lasted from the time of her lawgiver till the Achæan league; that, during five centuries, she was paramount in Greece, by her abstinence. It was immediately following the Periclean agewhich was that of Grecian luxury—that her moral decline commenced, in the age of Philip, or corruption, when her fall was completed. By civilization she made conquests; by her luxury she was herself overthrown." Bancroft observes: "The democracy of Athens, with all the imperfections in every part of its public service, with the abuses attending its finances, and the corruption which finally turned the elective franchise into a source of personal revenue, maintains its dignity in the eyes of the world; for there the elements of civil liberty were first called into action. No tongue can adequately praise many of the results of that State; and it would also be difficult to display the deficiencies in its organization, and the gross injustice of its foreign policy. Our own confederacy does not more surpass the Grecian in the extent of territory over which its liberties are diffused, than in the excellence of the details of its laws." The admirable maxim of Isocrates is worthy the attention of mod *Chenevix on Nat. Char., 1832. ern times, because it requires, as the foundation of national prosperity and obedience to law, the establishment of the religious principle, as the surest guarantee for both. His advice to Demonicus respecting a citizen was: "First exercise piety towards God, not only in sacrifices, but also in the preservation of oaths; for the former indeed may be an indication of abundant wealth, but the latter is a proof of integrity of character." The growing influence and contending interests of political parties in their struggles for ascendency, may superinduce the corruptions and treacheries which tarnish our national glory and jeopardize our national stability; and thus we are in danger of reenacting the political immoralities and crimes of the ancient republies-repeating the history and calamities of those splendid yet mournful examples of the past. The prerogatives of the Federal government must be maintained inviolate-the majesty of its authority supreme. In the multiplication of its constituent States there is great tendency to a reduction of the central constitutional power. In the desire for increasing territorial acquisitions, and a thirst for military renown, the harmony of the confederacy may also be fatally disturbed, and anarchy usurp its place. An instance of this we have. seen in the history of the Grecian republics. Severe and onerous military services were sustained by the warlike and heroic citizens of those ancient States, in consequence of this fostering, by the government, of an excessive desire for military power and conquest. military despot is surely no friend to national or civil liberty; and wherever the demagogue can take advantage of such social disorder, he is sure to do so. It may be well to repeat the warning given to us in the brilliant but terrible example of Athens,-it teaches us that an insatiate lust of territory marks the overthrow of a free State. A According to the political creed of Aristotle, the Grecian State was antecedent to the individual citizen. He therefore possessed no inherent personal rights, and was only allowed such immunities as were conferred by the State itself. Our commonwealth acknowledges an opposite rule. Both extremes are equally fatal to the liberties of a |