d Italy that she began to measure herself against
Asiatic despotisms. She became great enough to beat them before she
advanced far enough to contend with them. But such great good fortune
was and must be rare. Unnumbered little cities which might have
rivalled Rome or Athens doubtless perished without a sign long before
history was imagined. The small size and slight strength of early free
states made them always liable to easy destruction.

And their internal frailty is even greater. As soon as discussion
begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern
communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages
of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital
topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most violent
passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free states by
forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces
from within.

On this account such states are very rare in history. Upon the first
view of the facts a speculation might even be set up that they were
peculiar to a particular race. By far the most important free
institutions, and the only ones which have left living representatives
in the world, are the offspring either of the first constitutions of
the classical nations or of the first constitutions of the Germanic
nations. All living freedom runs back to them, and those truths which
at first sight would seem the whole of historical freedom, can be
traced to them. And both the Germanic and the classical nations belong
to what ethnologists call the Aryan race. Plausibly it might be argued
that the power of forming free states was superior in and peculiar to
that family of mankind. But unfortunately for this easy theory the
facts are inconsistent with it. In the first place, all the so-called
Aryan race certainly is not free. The eastern Aryans--those, for
example, who speak languages derived from the Sanscrit--are amongst the
most slavish divisions of mankind. To offer the Bengalese a free
constitution, and to expect them to work one, would be the maximum of
human folly. There then must be something else besides Aryan descent
which is necessary to fit men for discussion and train them for
liberty; and, what is worse for the argument we are opposing, some
non-Aryan races have been capable of freedom. Carthage, for example,
was a Semitic republic. We do not know all the details of its
constitution, but we know enoug