h for our present purpose. We know that
it was a government in which many proposers took part, and under which
discussion was constant, active, and conclusive. No doubt Tyre, the
parent city of Carthage, the other colonies of Tyre besides Carthage,
and the colonies of Carthage, were all as free as Carthage. We have
thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one
which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have
borrowed from or imitated them. So that the theory which would make
government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of
mankind is on the face of it untenable.

I am not prepared with any simple counter theory. I cannot profess to
explain completely why a very small minimum of mankind were, as long as
we know of them, possessed of a polity which as time went on suggested
discussions of principle, and why the great majority of mankind had
nothing like it. This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a
genius and why Bacon was a philosopher. Indeed it is the same, because
the causes which give birth to the startling varieties of individual
character, and those which give birth to similar varieties of national
character, are, in fact, the same. I have, indeed, endeavoured to show
that a marked type of individual character once originating in a nation
and once strongly preferred by it, is likely to be fixed on it and to
be permanent in it, from causes which were stated. Granted the
beginning of the type, we may, I think, explain its development and
aggravation; but we cannot in the least explain why the incipient type
of curious characters broke out, if I may so say, in one place rather
than in another. Climate and 'physical' surroundings, in the largest
sense, have unquestionably much influence; they are one factor in the
cause, but they are not the only factor; for we find most dissimilar
races of men living in the same climate and affected by the same
surroundings, and we have every reason to believe that those unlike
races have so lived as neighbours for ages. The cause of types must be
something outside the tribe acting on something within--something
inherited by the tribe. But what that something is I do not know that
any one can in the least explain.

The following conditions may, I think, be historically traced to the
nation capable of a polity, which suggests principles for discussion,
and so leads to progress. First, the nation must possess th