But the world-empire of Sargon and Sennacherib passed quickly, and for two causes, both inseparable from their methods. First, Assyria was drained of its manhood to fill the ranks of the army. Next, the policy of "frightfulness" filled the surrounding nations with such a deep hatred against Assyria that they all combined against her. Of the Assyrian armies it had been true

"A fire devoureth before them;

And behind them a flame burneth ;

The land is as the Garden of Eden before them,
And behind them a desolate wilderness;

Yea, and nothing shall escape them."

But the day came when judgment was poured out upon the city of blood, and Nineveh was laid waste: so utterly waste, that in comparatively few years its very site had been forgotten. "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;

And that which is done is that which shall be done;
And there is no new thing under the sun."

The house of Sargon, the city of Nineveh, and the Assyrian nation perished.

World-empire fell to another king, to another nation, and became centred in another city. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, succeeded to the power and to much of the dominions. of Sargon. He and his kingdom passed away in turn, but still the Empire remained: first under the rule of the Medes, then under Cyrus and his Persians; and it was yet further extended under Darius, the son of Hystaspes. Then, a century and a half later, the Empire was wrested from the feeble hands of a later Darius by Alexander the Macedonian. Thus the WorldEmpire which had once been Assyrian, and had become in succession Babylonian, Median, Persian, became nominally Greek. There is a legend of the temple raised to Diana in the grove of Aricia that the priest who served in it and who reigned as king over its sanctuary, won his right to that twofold office by the murder of his predecessor; and he himself kept it only till he fell under the dagger of the murderer who should succeed him. So these old-world conquerors succeeded each other by the claim that consecrated "the ghastly priest" of the Arician grove :

"The priest that slew the slayer,

And must himself be slain."

And such, sooner or later, must be the fate of any attempt to found world-empire by the power of the sword. "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."

THE SMALL SEABOARD STATES.

The great river valley communities of the ancient world do not afford the only type of the civilization of that time. There was another type, strongly contrasted with them in almost every particular.

"The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea."

All along the indented coast of Asia Minor, on the islands of the Ægean, in the creeks and harbours of Greece, cities had sprung up, each more or less isolated. All were on the seaboard, and on the landward side were generally closed in by mountains, so that the geography of the region led inevitably to the formation of little states, each complete in its isolation. One thing linked them together; it was indeed the sea which divided them, but the sea also united.

To these little maritime communities commerce was a necessity. The small land area commanded by each could not produce all that was needed, so that intercourse and exchange with other states were vital to them. Their populations, therefore, were obliged to be adventurous and resourceful. The sailor is the typical "handyman," and must always be on the alert. Further, in the community of ship life the personality of every man counts, and tends to become accentuated. Every ship, too, is a community complete in itself; sea life, therefore, was a training in the recognition of the corporate character of the home city, and the devotion to the welfare of that home city was increased with every return to it.

The river valley empire and the secluded seaport city were therefore the very antitheses, the one of the other. The first was a despotism, at the absolute disposal of a single man; the second tended to become a republic, governed in accordance with the wishes of the majority of its citizens. The two civilizations therefore stood for the two principles which Bacon has named "sovereignty" and "liberty." The principles were there embodied, there took concrete form.

Here is the interest which attaches to Marathon, and has made it famous through four and twenty centuries; for it was at Marathon that the first "decisive battle of the world" recorded in authentic history took place. Two world principles strove there.

Darius Hystaspis, the Napoleon of his day, both in military genius and able administration, had conquered practically the whole world known to him, except the little country of Greece;

and his conquests included the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor. Athens, which was closely connected with these Ionian cities by the ties of race, had just expelled its tyrant, Hippias, who sought the assistance of Darius. This would, no doubt, have been readily given in any case, but, as the Athenians helped in a revolt of the Ionian cities, Darius became greatly incensed against them, and determined upon their conquest. He despatched a powerful expedition which landed on the east coast of Attica, on a barren plain some twenty-five miles from Athens, and a revolution was also planned within the city itself. The Athenians marched out to the attack, and, though much outnumbered, fell upon the Persians with such swiftness and vigour that they drove them back to their ships with great slaughter, and succeeded in taking or destroying seven of the vessels. The rising in the city found no opportunity, and the Persian generals, feeling that their expedition had failed, returned home with the remnant of their forces.

The Battle of Marathon was only the first stage in the war between Persia and Greece; it was renewed again ten years later by the mighty expedition under Xerxes. But Marathon for the time was decisive, for if the Persian had succeeded there, the subjugation of the rest of Greece could hardly have been avoided, and, so far as we can see, the greater part of what we now owe to Greek intellect and achievement would have been lost to later ages.

Just as Athens did not hesitate to stand alone against the Persian invasion at Marathon, so she again bore the brunt of the attack in the greater war ten years later. Attica was over

run by the Persians, the Athenians went into exile and abandoned their city, which was burnt; of all the Greek states, they alone rose to this height of self-abnegation.

The spirit of liberty is not of itself a civic virtue. The unwillingness to accept authority, to obey orders, to restrain one's own self-will, is no virtue at all, but the reverse.

"He don't obey no orders except they be his own “

does not describe a man of high character, but a man without character, and it was when Israel had reached the lowest depths of national disintegration that it was written, "Every man did that which was right in his own eyes." But selfsacrifice, self-sacrifice to the uttermost for the sake of the liberty of others, this is the foundation-stone of all civic virtue, and the proud distinction of Athens was this-that she first recognized

that Greek liberty was worth sacrificing existence for, even her own existence as a city and state.

The fact that Athens stood alone in her appreciation of the meaning of the struggle, and in her readiness to sacrifice everything shows that, had she been overcome, there was no moral force elsewhere in Greece sufficient to have carried on the struggle. Greece would have ceased to be.

THE VALUE OF SMALL STATES.

And what would the world have lost?

We should have lost the results of that free play of human individuality and genius which grew out of the freedom of Athens, and of the other cities of Greece. In drama, Athens gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; in history, Thucydides; in philosophy, Plato. In Athens the fine arts, and especially sculpture, reached their highest development. Athens was trained Aristotle, the father of the sciences. Not all the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Macedon have contributed so much to intellectual progress as this one little Greek state, not so large as the county of Surrey.

In

We have been told of late by Treitzschke, the historianprophet of Germany, that the small state, by reason of its smallness, must necessarily be petty, confined, unambitious in its thoughts and life. Great events, enacted upon a broad stage, are necessary, in his belief, to raise men's thoughts and actions to the heroic scale. The instance of Athens, if it stood alone, would be sufficient to refute the argument. But Athens, though the most brilliant, was but the exemplar of many Greek city states, and the phenomenon of Athens was closely reproduced 1,500 years later in the achievements of Florence and other great Italian cities. All these shone in the very particulars of heroic and martial patriotism, of civic pride and political sagacity, which Treitzschke would claim as the monopoly of vast empires. The same virtues were also shown in pre-eminent degree by the free cities of the Netherlands, and another little state, one of the smallest of all, the inland city of Geneva, has had an influence on religious and political thought that has been world wide.

The principle of sovereignty has again and again sought to establish itself in world power, and it has as often failed, and failed because the military strength upon which it had relied to establish and maintain its dominance, has ebbed away, and because of the righteous hatred which its tyranny has always evoked.

Can world-empire then be based on liberty? Is it possible that an Athenian empire would fare better than a Persian? The case was put to the test, for just as Athens is the typical instance of a free state successfully resisting the principle of empire, so Athens in turn became the typical instance of the failure of a free state to establish empire.

The failure of Athens was most significant. The numerous little Greek city states had much in common. They recognized their kinship in blocd, they spoke the same language, they had the same religion, they shared in the same public celebrations, their civilizations were of the same type, they followed the same intellectual ideals. Yet it proved impossible to weld them together into a political unity; each city clung to its right to differ from the others; each proved in the outcome as jealous of Greek encroachment upon its individuality as of barbarian aggression. And the bitterness of Greek towards Greek was often deadly. Two great political crimes disfigure the history of this period, and illustrate the incompetence of the Greek to construct empire, even within the limits of the Greek-speaking world itself--the destruction of Platea by the Thebans, and the failure on the part of Athens to support Olynthus until it was too late to save it.

IS EMPIRE" DESIRABLE?

But if it be the case that small states are of such high importance to humanity, and if the attempt to establish Empire on an individualistic basis has failed as conspicuously as the attempt to found it on armed compulsion, does not the question arise," Is Empire itself desirable?"

But whether we like it or not, the fact is that human history flows in that direction. We have seen that Greece affords numerous examples of the small city state. It was indeed a fundamental principle to Aristotle that a city too large for its citizens to hear the voice of a single town-crier had passed the limits of wholesome growth. But in the later Middle Ages, when this idea of the free city state was producing some of its most splendid examples, another force was again making itself felt-the idea of nationhood, as something higher, fuller, nobler than cityhood. Community of race, of religion, of language, were each felt to be reasons for striving for unity of government and law. So, through the long centuries, England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany have struggled, hoped and worked for this ideal. So, to-day, Greece, Roumania, Serbia, Bulgaria,