e several cantons, and at length
produced the internal dissolution of even local authority; which in
its view of religion first invested the gods with human attributes,
and then denied their existence; which allowed full play to the
limbs in the sports of the naked youth, and gave free scope to
thought in all its grandeur and in all its awfulness;--and that
Roman character, which solemnly bound the son to reverence the
father, the citizen to reverence the ruler, and all to reverence the
gods; which required nothing and honoured nothing but the useful
act, and compelled every citizen to fill up every moment of his
brief life with unceasing work; which made it a duty even in the
boy modestly to cover the body; which deemed every one a bad citizen
who wished to be different from his fellows; which regarded the
state as all in all, and a desire for the state's extension as the
only aspiration not liable to censure,--who can in thought trace
back these sharply-marked contrasts to that original unity which
embraced them both, prepared the way for their development, and at
length produced them? It would be foolish presumption to desire
to lift this veil; we shall only endeavour to indicate in brief
outline the beginnings of Italian nationality and its connections
with an earlier period--to direct the guesses of the discerning
reader rather than to express them.

The Family and the State

All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rested
in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes
especially the moral and decorous arrangement of social life,(9)
which enjoined monogamy on the husband and visited with heavy
penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the
equality of the sexes and the sanctity of marriage in the high
position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle.
On the other hand the rigorous development of the marital and still
more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of
persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks and peculiarly
Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became
transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of
the slave being completely destitute of legal rights--a principle
involved in the very nature of slavery--was maintained by the Romans
with merciless rigour and carried out to all its consequences;
whereas among the Greeks alleviations of its harshness were early