the fortunes of intellectual civilization were then at the mercy of what seems an insignificant probability. If the Persian leaders had only shown that decent skill and ordinary military prudence which it was likely they would show, Grecian freedom would have been at an end: Athens, like so many Ionian cities on the other side of the Egean, would have been absorbed into a great despotism; all we now remember her for, we should not remember, for it would never have occurred. Her citizens might have been ingenious and imitative and clever, they could not certainly have been free and original. Rome was preserved from subjection to a great empire by her fortunate distance from one: the early wars of Rome are with cities like Rome, about equal in size though inferior in valor; it was only when she had conquered Italy that she began to measure herself against Asiatic despotisms, she became great enough to beat them. before she advanced far enough to contend with them. But such great good fortune was and must be rare: unnumbered little cities which might have rivaled Rome or Athens doubtless perished without a sign long before history was imagined; the small size and slight strength of early free states made them always liable to easy destruction.

And their internal frailty is even greater. As soon as discussion begins, the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern communities, where those propensities too have been weakened by ages of culture and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most violent passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free states by forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces from within.

On this account such states are very rare in history. Upon the first view of the facts, a speculation might even be set up that they were peculiar to a particular race. By far the most important free

institutions, and the only ones which have left living representatives in the world, are the offspring either of the first constitutions of the classical nations or of the first constitutions of the Germanic nations; all living freedom runs back to them, and those truths which at first sight would seem the whole of historical freedom can be traced to them: and both the Germanic and the classical nations belong to what ethnologists call the Aryan race. Plausibly it might be argued that the power of forming free states was superior in or peculiar to that family of mankind; but unfortunately for this easy theory, the facts are inconsistent with it. In the first place, all the socalled Aryan race certainly is not free: the eastern Aryans those, for example, who speak languages derived from the Sanskrit - are amongst the most slavish divisions of mankind; to offer the Bengalese a free constitution and to expect them to work one would be the maximum of human folly. There then must be something else besides Aryan descent which is necessary to fit men for discussion and train them for liberty; and what is worse for the argument we are opposing, some non-Aryan races have been capable of freedom. Carthage, for example, was a Semitic republic: we do not know all the details of its constitution, but we know enough for our present purpose; we know that it was a government in which many proposers took part, and under which discussion was constant, active, and conclusive. No doubt Tyre, the parent city of Carthage, the other colonies of Tyre besides Carthage, and the colonies. of Carthage, were all as free as Carthage. We have thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have borrowed from or imitated them; so that the theory which would make government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of mankind is on the face of it untenable.

VOL. IV. 36

I am not prepared with any simple counter theory. I cannot profess to explain completely why a very small minimum of mankind were, as long as we know of them, possessed of a polity which as time went on suggested discussions of principle, and why the great majority of mankind had nothing like it. This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a genius and why Bacon was a philosopher; indeed it is the same, because the causes which give birth to the startling varieties of individual character and those which give birth to similar varieties. of national character are in fact the same. I have indeed endeavored to show that a marked type of individual character once originating in a nation, and once strongly preferred by it, is likely to be fixed on it and to be permanent in it, from causes which were stated. Granted the beginning of the type, we may, I think, explain its development and aggravation; but we cannot in the least explain why the incipient type of curious characters broke out, if I may so say, in one place rather than in another. Climate and "physical" surroundings, in the largest sense, have unquestionably much influence, they are one factor in the cause; but they are not the only factor, for we find most dissimilar races of men living in the same climate and affected by the same surroundings, and we have every reason to believe that those unlike races have so lived as neighbors for ages. The cause of types must be something outside the tribe acting on something within-something inherited by the tribe; but what that something is, I do not know that any one can in the least explain.

The following conditions may, I think, be historically traced to the nation capable of a polity which suggests principles for discussion, and so leads to progress-First, the nation must possess the patria potestas in some form so marked as to give family life distinctness and precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline possible and probable.

While descent is traced only through the mother, and while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high polity is possible. Secondly, that polity would seem to have been created very gradually, by the aggregation of families into clans or gentes, and of clans into nations, and then again by the widening of nations so as to include circumjacent outsiders as well as the first compact and sacred group; the number of parties to a discussion was at first augmented very slowly. Thirdly, the number of "open" subjects, as we should say nowadays, that is, of subjects on which public opinion was optional and on which discussion was admitted,

was at first very small. Custom ruled everything originally, and the area of free argument was enlarged but very slowly. If I am at all right, that area could only be enlarged thus slowly; for custom was in early days the cement of society, and if you suddenly questioned such custom you would destroy society. But though the existence of these conditions may be traced historically, and though the reason of them may be explained philosophically, they do not completely solve the question why some nations. have the polity and some not; on the contrary, they plainly leave a large "residual phenomenon" unexplained and unknown.

II.

In this manner polities of discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and helped it; but this is only one of the many gifts which those politics have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not going to write a eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is

in many respects not at all suited to civilized circumstances. A main and principal excellence in the early times of the human races is the impulse to action. The problems before men are then plain and simple: the man who works hardest, the man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish - even later on, the man who tends the largest herds or the man who tills the largest field-is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to kill its enemies or which kills most of its enemies is the nation which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man- the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting"-will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it: and in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from "man's being unable to sit still in a room"; and though I do not go that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet, we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we came to act. The rise of physical science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way if it had not been for quiet people who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances (the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits), if "idle stargazers" had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies, our modern astronomy