merous colonies, which along the
Asiatic shores, in the Grecian isles, on the plains of Italy, and even
in Libya and in Egypt, were destined to give, as it were, a second
youth to the parent states.

II. The ancient Greek constitution was that of an aristocracy, with a
prince at the head. Suppose a certain number of men, thus governed,
to be expelled their native soil, united by a common danger and common
suffering, to land on a foreign shore, to fix themselves with pain and
labour in a new settlement--it is quite clear that a popular principle
would insensibly have entered the forms of the constitution they
transplanted. In the first place, the power of the prince would be
more circumscribed--in the next place, the free spirit of the
aristocracy would be more diffused: the first, because the authority
of the chief would rarely be derived from royal ancestry, or hallowed
by prescriptive privilege; in most cases he was but a noble, selected
from the ranks, and crippled by the jealousies, of his order: the
second, because all who shared in the enterprise would in one respect
rise at once to an aristocracy--they would be distinguished from the
population of the state they colonized. Misfortune, sympathy, and
change would also contribute to sweep away many demarcations; and
authority was transmuted from a birthright into a trust, the moment it
was withdrawn from the shelter of ancient custom, and made the gift of
the living rather than a heritage from the dead. It was probable,
too, that many of such colonies were founded by men, among whom was
but little disparity of rank: this would be especially the case with
those which were the overflow of a redundant population; the great and
the wealthy are never redundant!--the mass would thus ordinarily be
composed of the discontented and the poor, and even where the
aristocratic leaven was most strong, it was still the aristocracy of
some defeated and humbled faction. So that in the average equality of
the emigrators were the seeds of a new constitution; and if they
transplanted the form of monarchy, it already contained the genius of
republicanism. Hence, colonies in the ancient, as in the modern
world, advanced by giant strides towards popular principles.
Maintaining a constant intercourse with their father-land, their own
constitutions became familiar and tempting to the population of the
countries they had abandoned; and much of whatsoever advantages were
derived from