of free discussion. The narrow strait between Athens and England sinks into nothing beside the impassable gulf which fences off both from Sparta or Venice or 'imperial' France. Where there is free discussion of every subject of public interest, where no man is afraid to speak his mind on the most important affairs of the commonwealth, it matters comparatively little whether the intercourse between citizen and citizen is carried on with their own tongues or through the medium of type and paper. Thoughts pent up under the bondage of a despotism or an oligarchy would gladly catch at either means of expression, without being over-nice as to the comparative merits of the two methods.

In the case both of ancient Greece and of medieval Italy, the nation which, at that particular period, stood far above all others in every material and intellectual advantage is found incapable or careless of a combined national government: each is split up into endless states, many of them of the smallest possible size. This system of 'separate townautonomy' is indeed by no means peculiar to old Greece or to medieval Italy. These two lands are merely those which supplied its most perfect examples, those which showed it forth on the greatest scale, and adorned it with the richest accompaniments of art, literature, and general cultivation. The separate city-community, as Mr. Grote has shown, was the earliest form of organized freedom. It is the simplest and the most obvious form. To unite a large territory into a federal commonwealth or a constitutional monarchy implies a much higher and later stage of political progress. Or it might be more accurate to say that it needs such a higher and later stage to show that those forms of government are really capable of combining freedom and order. For, in old Greece and the neighbouring states, it was precisely the most advanced states which clung most fondly to their separate town-autonomy. It is only among the less advanced and half-barbaric portions of the race that we find the rude germs

of the other two forms of freedom. Aitolia, Phôkis,* and other backward portions of the Hellenic race, had something like federal commonwealths. The half-barbarian states of

Macedonia and Molossis had something like constitutional monarchies. Yet no one would think of setting their governments on a level with the democracy of Athens, or even with such moderate oligarchies as Corinth, Chios, or Rhodes. In the same way, in primæval Italy, the principle of town-autonomy was greatly modified in the Latin, Etruscan, and Samnite federations. The one Italian city which always clave to its distinct autonomy was the one which rose to the empire of Italy and the world. In medieval Switzerland again there arose a freedom purer, if less brilliant, than that of medieval Italy; but there town-autonomy was still more largely modified. It was modified by the relation, lax as it was, of the federal tie, and by the existence of rural democracies alongside of the urban commonwealths. And, during the best days of the League, it was further modified by an acknowledgement of the power of the Emperors far more full than they ever could win in Italy. In other parts of Germany, free cities flourished indeed; but they were mere exceptions to princely rule; they were closely connected with the chief of the Empire; they rejoiced in the title of 'free Imperial city,' which, in the ears of a Greek, would have sounded like a contradiction in terms. In France the cities maintained, for a while, their internal republican constitutions; in Spain they were even invested with supremacy over considerable surrounding dictricts; but, in both cases, they fell before a kingly power stronger and more encroaching than that of the German Emperors. England had mere municipalities; the greater strength of the central power, the more general diffusion of political rights, neither allowed nor needed the formation of even tributary republics. But, had the monarchy founded by the Conqueror possessed no greater inherent

*I do not mention Boeotia, because the hardly disguised sovereignty of Thebes hinders it from being regarded as a truly federal state.

vigour than the monarchy founded by Charles the Great, it is easy to conceive that London, York, and Bristol might have imitated, though they would hardly have rivalled, the career of Florence, Bern, and Nürnberg.*

It may perhaps be worth noting that freedom, and freedom too in this particular form of town-autonomy, has never been left without a witness upon earth. Hellenic freedom was far from utterly wiped out, either at the fight of Chairôneia or at the sack of Corinth. The commonwealths of Rhodes and Byzantion, the wise confederacy of Lykia, kept at least an internal independence till Rome was becoming an acknowledged monarchy. And even then, one shoot of the old tree continued to flourish on a distant soil. Far away, on the northern shores of the Inhospitable Sea, for a thousand years after Sparta and Athens had sunk in bondage, did the Hellenic city of Cherson remain, the only state in the world where freedom and civilization were not divorced. In close connexion with the lords of Rome and Constantinople, the old Megarian colony still retained a freedom far more than municipal; its relation might be that of a dependent ally, but it was still alliance and not subjection. How many of the warriors and the tourists, how many of the ephemeral writers of the day, who have compassed the fortress of Sebastopol, so much as knew that they were treading on the ruins of the last of the Greek republics. Such was Cherson up to the ninth century; still free, still Greek, ruled by Hellenic Presidents, who slew Barbarian Kings in single combat. In the ninth century, under the Byzantine Theophilos, she ceased to be free; in the tenth, under the Russian Vladimir, she well nigh ceased to be Hellenic. But, by that time, freedom had begun to show itself once more in the western world. Free commercial commonwealths again arose on the Hadriatic and on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Venice, Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi might, as vassals or slavest of the Byzantine Cæsar, withstand

* [See History of the Norman Conquest, iv. 208.]

† ἡμεῖς δοῦλοι θέλομεν εἶναι τοῦ Ῥωμαίων βασίλεως. See Gibbon, cap. lx. note 37.

the claims of his Teutonic rival: but, in truth, they flourished in possession of a freedom with which neither Empire interfered. Venice, in later years, may be deemed to have more in common with despotic than with republican states; but the Campanian republics handed on the torch of freedom to those of Lombardy; Milan and Alessandria handed it on to Florence and Sienna, to Zürich, Bern, and Geneva. Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, the most thrilling names of all, needed neither precept nor example to guide them to a democracy more perfect than the world had seen since Antipatros entered Athens. But the freedom of the mountains is distinct from the freedom of the cities; the old uncontaminated Switzer was not an Athenian or a Florentine, but an Aitolian who had unlearned, or had never fallen into, the turbulence and brigandage of his race.

The results of this system of town-autonomy seem strange to us in these days of wide-spread empires. We are tempted to mock at political history on so small a scale; we are tempted to despise the revolutions of independent commonwealths less populous than many an English borough. Both in Greece and in Italy, towns which, in most lands, would have merely swelled the private estate of some neighbouring lord took to themselves every attribute of sovereignty, and, in their external relations and their internal revolutions, they exhibited greater political activity than the mightiest contemporary kingdoms. Each city has its own national being, around which every feeling of patriotism gathers; each calls its citizens under its banner, to harry the fields and homesteads of its neighbour, or to defend its own from the like harm. Each has its own internal political life; each is rent by its own factions; each witnesses the alternate sway of democracy and oligarchy, or beholds both fall beneath the rod of some foreign or domestic tyrant. Greece and Italy alike set before us a scene of endless war-of war of a kind at once more terrible and more ennobling than the political contests of later times. In the wars of a great monarchy the subject has no voice on the question of war and peace; he has often

but a faint knowledge indeed of the reasons why a war is either begun or ended. Except in the case of invasion, war, to all but a professional class, means simply increase of taxation and the occasional loss of a friend or kinsman. Even when a country is invaded, it can only be a very small part of a great kingdom on which the scourge directly lights. Very different was the warfare of the old Greek and Italian commonwealths. Every citizen had a voice in the debate and a hand in the struggle. Each was ready personally to inflict, and personally to suffer, all the hardships of war. Each man might fairly look forward, some time in his life, to witness the pillage of his crops and the burning of his house, even if he and his escaped the harder doom of massacre, violation, or slavery. In Greece and Italy alike war went through two stages. In the first, it was carried on by a citizen militia, of whom every man had a personal interest in the strife. In the second, the duty of doing or warding off injury was entrusted to hireling banditti, heedless in what cause their lances were levelled. In Greece and Italy alike, the internal history of each city shows us a picture of every stage of political progress; each grows and decays with a swiftness to which larger states hardly ever afford a parallel. In each case we see that these little communities could cherish a warmth of patriotism, an intensity of political life, beyond example in the records of extensive kingdoms. A large well-governed state secures the blessings of order and tranquillity to a greater number; but it does so at the expense of condemning a large proportion even of its citizens to practical nonentity. Citizenship is less valued, and it is therefore more freely conferred. But in the single city, each full citizen has his intellectual and political faculties nourished and sharpened to the highest pitch. Athens and Florence could reckon a soldier, a statesman, or a diplomatist, in every head of a free household. Citizenship then was a personal right and a personal privilege; it was a possession far too dearly valued to be granted at random to the mob of slaves or foreigners. In such a state of things,