not happen at a given time; and it merely creates confusion to affirm it of one item in particular. Pericles schemed something like a federal union;[132] and had his practice been in accord with his ideal, it might conceivably have been at least tried. M. Fustel de Coulanges well points out how the primary religious conception of the ancient City-State expelled and negatived that of a composite State (La Cité antique, l. iii, ch. xiv, p. 239); that is a process of rational explanation. But unless we conceive the "failures" of the past as lessons to be profited by, there can be neither a social nor a moral science. Freeman, however, actually proceeds to say that Greek federation was utterly undesirable—an extraordinary doctrine in a treatise devoted to studying and advocating federalism. On the principles thus laid down, Dr. Freeman's denunciation of Austria and France in modern times is irrational, since that which has happened in these countries is that which alone was possible; and the problem as to the desirable is hopelessly obscured.
To say that "Greece united in a federal bond could never have become the Greece" we admire (id. p. 184), is only to vary the verbalism. Granted that Hellenic greatness as we know it was "inseparably limited to the system of independent city commonwealths," it remains a rational proposition that had the Greek cities federated they could have developed their general culture further than they actually did, though the special splendour of Periclean Athens could not in that case have been so quickly attained. And as the fall of Greece is no less "inseparably linked" with the separateness of the States, Dr. Freeman's proposition suggests or implies an assertion of the desirableness of that fall. Mr. T. Whittaker, in his notable essay on The Liberal State (1907, pp. 70–72), rightly puts it as a fatality of the Greek State that it could neither enter into nor absorb a larger community, but recognises this as a failure to solve the great problem. When, however, he writes that "the free development of Athens as an autonomous State would have been restricted by a real federation in which other States had a voice of their own," he partly sets up the difficulty created by Freeman. Wherein would Athens have suffered as to freedom?
The lesson for modern democracies from the story of the ancient is thus clear enough. To flourish, they must have peace; they must sooner or later practise a scientific and humane restraint of population—the sooner the better, as destruction of surplus population is always going on, even with emigration; they must check inequality, which is the fountain of domestic dispeace; and they must maintain a progressive and scientific culture. And the lesson is one that may now be acted on as it never could have been before. There is no longer a reserve of fecund barbarism ready to overwhelm a civilisation that ceases to be pugnacious; and the civilised States have it in their own power to submit their quarrels to bloodless arbitrament. The inveterate strifes of the Greeks belong to a past stage of civilisation, and were in any case the product of peculiar geographical conditions, Greece being physically divided, externally among islands, and internally into a multitude of glens, which in the days of City-State life and primitive means of communication preserved a state of cantonal separateness and feud, just as did the physical conditions of the Scottish Highlands in the days before effective monarchic rule.
This permanent dissociation of the City-States was only a more intractable form of the primary divisions of the districts. Thus in Attica itself the divisions of party largely followed the localities: "There were as many parties among them as there were different tracts of land in their country"—the mountain-dwellers being democratic, while the plain-dwellers were for an oligarchy, and the coast-dwellers sought a mixed government. (Plutarch, Solon, cc. 13, 29; Aristotle, Polity of Athens, c. 13.) See the question further discussed below, ch. iv, § 2 (c).
Indeed, the fulness of the autonomous life attained by the separate cities was a psychological hindrance to their political union, given the primary geographical sunderance. Thus we have in the old Amphictyonic councils the evidence of a measure of peaceful political attraction among the tribes before the cities were developed;[133] yet on those ancient beginnings there was no political advance till the rise of formal federalism in the Ætolian and Achaian Leagues after the death of Alexander. And that federalism was not ethically higher than the spirit of the ancient Amphictyonic oath, preserved by Æschines. The balance of the forces of separateness and political wisdom is to be conceived in terms of a given degree of culture relatively to a given set of physical conditions. Happily the deadlock in question no longer subsists for civilised States.
Again, there is now possible a scientific control of population, without infanticide, without vice, without abortion. There has been attained a degree of democratic stability and enlightenment which given peace, permits of a secure gradual extension of the principle of equality by sound machinery. And there is now accumulated a treasury of seminal knowledge which makes possible an endless intellectual progress, the great antiseptic of political decay, provided only that the foregoing conditions are secured. This is, in brief, the programme of progressive democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[92] Cp. Mr. Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, 1896, pp. 327–28, as to the recent rise of class hatred in the United States.
[93] Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 142.
[94] "Freedom flourishes in colonies. Ancient usages cannot be preserved … as at home. … Where every man lives by the labour of his hands, equality arises, even where it did not originally exist" (Heeren, Pol. Hist. of Greece, Eng. tr. p. 88. Cp. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, p. 99). Note, in this connection, the whole development of Magna Græcia. Sybaris was "perhaps in 510 B.C. the greatest of all Grecian cities" (Grote, part ii, ch. 37). As to the early strifes in the colonies, cp. Meyer, ii, 681.
[95] Such was the legal course of things before Solon (Grote, ii, 465–66; Ingram, History of Slavery, p. 16; cp. Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, 2te Aufl. i, 341; Aristotle, Polity of Athens, cc. 2, 4, 6; Wachsmuth, Histor. Antiq. of the Greeks, § 33, Eng. tr. 1837, i, 244).
[96] Cp. Schömann, i, 114; Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 159; Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, 642. In the historic period the majority of slaves are said to have been of non-Greek race (Schömann, i, 112; Burckhardt, i, 158). But this is said without much evidence. The custom was to kill adult male captives and enslave the women and children. Men captives who were spared by the Athenians were put to slavery in the mines (Burckhardt, citing Polyaenus, II, i, 26).
[97] E.g. Telys at Sybaris, Theagenes at Megara, and Kypselus at Corinth, in the sixth century B.C.; and Klearchus at Herakleia in the fourth (Grote. ii, 414, 418; iv, 95; x, 394). Compare the appeals made to Solon by both parties to make himself despot (Plutarch, Solon, c. 14).
[98] As at Sparta under Agis IV (Plutarch, Agis, c. 13; Thirlwall, c. lxii, 1st ed. viii, 142). The claims were restored at Agis's death (id. p. 163).
[99] As by Cleomenes, soon after (id. p. 164).
[100] E.g. Agesilaus in the same crisis.
