s disloyalty, and refusal to pay was promptly
punished as revolt. Permitting and encouraging her subject allies to
furnish all their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of
ships and men, the sovereign republic gained the double object of
training her own citizens by constant and well-paid service in her
fleets, and of seeing her confederates lose their skill and discipline
by inaction, and become more and more passive and powerless under her
yoke. Their towns were generally dismantled, while the imperial city
herself was fortified with the greatest care and sumptuousness; the
accumulated revenues from her tributaries serving to strengthen and
adorn to the utmost her havens, her docks, her arsenals, her theatres,
and her shrines, and to array her in that plenitude of architectural
magnificence the ruins of which still attest the intellectual grandeur
of the age and people which produced a Pericles to plan and a Phidias to
execute.

All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations rule them
selfishly and oppressively. There is no exception to this in either
ancient or modern times. Carthage, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa,
Holland, and republican France, all tyrannized over every province and
subject state where they gained authority. But none of them openly
avowed their system of doing so upon principle with the candor which the
Athenian republicans displayed when any remonstrance was made against
the severe exactions which they imposed upon their vassal allies. They
avowed that their empire was a tyranny, and frankly stated that they
solely trusted to force and terror to uphold it. They appealed to what
they called "the eternal law of nature, that the weak should be coerced
by the strong." Sometimes they stated, and not without some truth, that
the unjust hatred of Sparta against themselves forced them to be unjust
to others in self-defence. To be safe, they must be powerful; and to be
powerful, they must plunder and coerce their neighbors. They never
dreamed of communicating any franchise, or share in office, to their
dependants, but jealously monopolized every post of command and all
political and judicial power; exposing themselves to every risk with
unflinching gallantry; embarking readily in every ambitious scheme; and
never suffering difficulty or disaster to shake their tenacity of
purpose: in the hope of acquiring unbounded empire for their country,
and the means of maintaining each of t