t is necessary for making the mould of
civilisation, and hardening the soft fibre of early man.

The first recorded history of the Aryan race shows everywhere a king, a
council, and, as the necessity of early conflicts required, the king in
much prominence and with much power. That there could be in such ages
anything like an oriental despotism, or a Caesarean despotism, was
impossible; the outside extra-political army which maintains them could
not exist when the tribe was the nation, and when all the men in the
tribe were warriors. Hence, in the time of Homer, in the first times of
Rome, in the first times of ancient Germany, the king is the most
visible part of the polity, because for momentary welfare he is the
most useful. The close oligarchy, the patriciate, which alone could
know the fixed law, alone could apply the fixed law, which was
recognised as the authorised custodian of the fixed law, had then sole
command over the primary social want. It alone knew the code of drill;
it alone was obeyed; it alone could drill. Mr. Grote has admirably
described the rise of the primitive oligarchies upon the face of the
first monarchy, but perhaps because he so much loves historic Athens,
he has not sympathised with pre-historic Athens. He has not shown us
the need of a fixed life when all else was unfixed life.

It would be schoolboyish to explain at length how well the two great
republics, the two winning republics of the ancient world, embody these
conclusions. Rome and Sparta were drilling aristocracies, and succeeded
because they were such. Athens was indeed of another and higher order;
at least to us instructed moderns who know her and have been taught by
her. But to the 'Philistines' of those days Athens was of a lower
order. She was beaten; she lost the great visible game which is all
that short-sighted contemporaries know. She was the great 'free
failure' of the ancient world. She began, she announced, the good
things that were to come; but she was too weak to display and enjoy
them; she was trodden down by those of coarser make and better trained
frame.

How much these principles are confirmed by Jewish history is obvious.
There was doubtless much else in Jewish history--whole elements with
which I am not here concerned. But so much is plain. The Jews were in
the beginning the most unstable of nations; they were submitted to
their law, and they came out the most stable of nations. Their polity
was indeed defect