ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he knew
it was occupied by States enormously larger than his rule allowed. But
he denied that the great barbarian monarchies were in the truest sense
'States' at all.

[95] _Ethics_, IX., X. 3. [Greek: oute gar ek deka anthropon genoit' an
polis, out' ek deka myriadon eti polis estin.]

[96] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on which Aristotle relied
were both real and important. The history of the Greek and mediaeval
City-States shows how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the
highest activities and emotions of mankind when the whole environment
of each citizen comes within the first-hand range of his senses and
memory. It is now only here and there, in villages outside the main
stream of civilisation, that men know the faces of their neighbours and
see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages in which they
work and rest. Yet, even now, when a village is absorbed by a sprawling
suburb or overwhelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, some
of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing touch with the deeper
realities of life.

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard-thinking old Yorkshire
schoolmaster on the high moorland edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was
the country-house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below us
ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing villages which
already were beginning to stretch out towards each other, and threatened
soon to extend through the valley an unbroken succession of tall
chimneys and slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the old
affection for place and home had disappeared from the district. I asked
whether he thought that a new affection was possible, whether, now that
men lived in the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather than in
the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriotism of books and maps
might not appear which should be a better guide to life than the
patriotism of the village street.

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, nothing, he said,
had taken its place, or would take its place, but a naked and restless
individualism, always seeking for personal satisfaction, and always
missing it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, he began
to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we could regain the true
riches of life by forgetting steam and electricity