Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/88

52 STATESMEN AND SAGES ness of trying to unify Greece or to make her independent of Persia through any of the devices paraded by the politicians. Therefore, with patriotism and philan- thropy enough to give their cause a certain moral glow in their minds, they set out by force of arms the only possible way to succeed first, to unify Greece, and next, to make her eternally independent of Persia. Since Gustav Droysen, in his " Alexander the Great," led off with this theory, the best writers upon Greek history have gradually adopted it, deserting Grote more and more. Droy- sen went too far. With him Alexander was the veritable demigod whom he sottishly decreed that his subjects should see in him. Droysen, of course, has too little respect for Demosthenes's policy. Victor Duruy is the only late writer of note who still blows the trumpet for our old orator as a statesman. He says that " the result of the Macedonian dominion was the death of European Greece," md he calls it the immortal glory of Demosthenes to have perceived this ; yet even he admits that " the civilization of the world gained " by the Macedonian conquest, and hence, after all, places himself, " from the point of view of the world's history, on the side of Philip and his son." The tendency of writers upon this period is thus to exalt the man with a great national policy in his head though with a sword in his hand, at the expense of him who, never so honestly, dinned the populace with his high-sounding pleas for an obstructive course. We are learning that republicanism or democracy, whichever one pleases to call it, was in ancient times a very different thing from aught that now exists under either name. The various republics of Greece and the republic of Rome were nothing but oligarchies, often atrociously tyrannical. Even at their best estate the rights of individuals in them, of their citizens even, were far less per- fectly guarded than in some pretty absolute monarchies of later times. " The Athenian imperial democracy was no popular government. In the first place there was no such thing as representation in their constitution. Those only had votes who could come and give them at the general assembly, and they did so at once upon the conclusion of the debate. There was no Second Cham- ber or Higher Council to revise or delay their decisions ; no crown ; no High Court of Appeal to settle claims against the state. The body of Athenian citi- zens formed the assembly. Sections of this body formed the jury to try cases of violation of the constitution either in act or in the proposal of new laws. " The result was that all outlying provinces, even had they obtained votes, were without a voice in the government. But as a matter of fact they had no votes, for the states which became^ubject to Athens were merely tributary ; and nothing was further from the ideas of the Athenians than to make them mem- bers of their Imperial Republic, in the sense that a new State is made a member of the American Republic. " This it was which ruined even the great Roman republic, without any mili- tary reverses, and when its domination of the world was unshaken. Owing to the absence of representation, the empire of the Roman republic was in the hands of the city population, who were perfectly incompetent, even had they been in real earnest, to manage the government of the vast kingdoms their troops had