e guided by the discussion must hear it with their own ears,
must be brought face to face with the orator, and must feel his
influence for themselves. The first free states were little towns,
smaller than any political division which we now have, except the
Republic of Andorre, which is a sort of vestige of them. It is in the
market-place of the country town, as we should now speak, and in petty
matters concerning the market-town, that discussion began, and thither
all the long train of its consequences may be traced back. Some
historical inquirers, like myself, can hardly look at such a place
without some sentimental musing, poor and trivial as the thing seems.
But such small towns are very feeble. Numbers in the earliest wars, as
in the latest, are a main source of victory. And in early times one
kind of state is very common and is exceedingly numerous. In every
quarter of the globe we find great populations compacted by traditional
custom and consecrated sentiment, which are ruled by some
soldier--generally some soldier of a foreign tribe, who has conquered
them, and, as it has been said, 'vaulted on the back' of them, or whose
ancestors have done so. These great populations, ruled by a single
will, have, doubtless, trodden down and destroyed innumerable little
cities who were just beginning their freedom.

In this way the Greek cities in Asia were subjected to the Persian
Power, and so OUGHT the cities in Greece proper to have been subjected
also. Every schoolboy must have felt that nothing but amazing folly and
unmatched mismanagement saved Greece from conquest both in the time of
Xerxes and in that of Darius. The fortunes of intellectual civilisation
were then at the mercy of what seems an insignificant probability. If
the Persian leaders had only shown that decent skill and ordinary
military prudence which it was likely they would show, Grecian freedom
would have been at an end. Athens, like so many Ionian cities on the
other side of the AEgean, would have been absorbed into a great
despotism; all we now remember her for we should not remember, for it
would never have occurred. Her citizens might have been ingenious, and
imitative, and clever; they could not certainly have been free and
original. Rome was preserved from subjection to a great empire by her
fortunate distance from one. The early wars of Rome are with cities
like Rome--about equal in size, though inferior in valour. It was only
when she had conquere