which are involved in the formation and in the growth of cities. So too was the acceptance of the gradation of classes and the variety of function, which in the agricultural tribe were unnecessary, but in the more complicated organisation were essential. But the most important of all branches of the study in which we are engaged is that of the formation and growth of morality; to trace the extent to which, and the processes by which, the purely selfish feelings, the desire to gain an individual end, and to secure the gratification of an immediate individual desire, are taught or made to give way to a consideration of the rights, and to the wish to increase the happiness of others. City life forms a striking part in this enquiry. It marks the out-going of the sympathies, the affections, the consciousness of duty-owing, to a circle much wider than that which at first restricted them. The affection of one member of a family to another is a little but only a little removed from that of selfish desire for one's own pleasure. It is the first and most instinctive form of morality. The extension of any part of this feeling to the members of the tribe, where, although the general idea of blood relationship exists, the terms of actual association are less intimate, is a step in advance. When the social circle is extended so as to embrace several tribes of the same stock in joint operations either industrial or defensive, a further advance is made, and this is the state to which public morality had reached when Cities were first formed. Their effect was not only to broaden the bases of morality-merging the idea of kinship into the wider and less personal one of citizenship; but by degrees it almost infinitely increased the occasions on which self had to be subordinated, and the claims and the rights of others had to be recognised.

The limitations within which the political idea of the City operated became afterwards obstacles or hindrances to further progress; but at first they marked not a narrowing or restriction of social life and morality but a wide extension of them. The idea of the City did not conflict with that of the nation but pre ceded it. All that was possible to the Greek 600 years B.C. in

the way of patriotic devotion, of disciplined joint action, of unselfish affection and exertion, of intellectual aspiration, of artistic culture, found its full and complete development in his city. To us this seems a narrower range than his sympathies and his energies might have found, that it contained elements which forbad the extension and was fatal to the permanence of the state. But the Greek has to be judged not by the subsequent ideas of a future to which he did not aspire, but to the conditions of the past from which he had so grandly emerged.

It is nevertheless true that the limitations did exist, and that in the end they became injurious. The very nearness of the City to the Citizen whilst it gave a passionate force to his patriotism, narrowed and often embittered his feelings towards neighbouring communities, the people of which might have been fellow countrymen, but became rivals and enemies. Nor whilst the exclusive City ideal existed could a nation be created. Greece was not a nation but a number of partly formed nations competing with, and fighting against, each other. When Athens strove to found a Colonial Empire, connected by mutual obligations and working for mutual ends, what she succeeded in doing was to establish or to strengthen a series of City Communities each of which strove to realise for itself the Hellenic idea of a City independent and self-contained. Thus nationality as distinct from municipality was not possible either by the accretion of existing units, or by the growth from a common centre.

There was another way in which the comparative narrowness of the sphere of political activities had evil tendencies. The personal jealousies and rivalries of neighbours added bitterness to the animosities of opposing statesmen, and struggles like that between Kleon and Nikias would have been less violent in themselves and certainly less dangerous to their country, if their scene had been a national assembly in which diverse provinces and communities were represented, instead of a City assembly in which all present were close personal friends, adherents, or partizans of one or other combatant. Quarrels-which would not have seriously

disturbed a nation, caused disruption and revolution in a City. The fact that the Government of the City was the highest and most important outlet for social and political activity, and its administration the highest function to which the ambitious citizen could aspire, whilst it added brilliance to the contests which went on, added also to their vehemence and to their frequency. There was thus induced a marvellous activity-as seen in the cases of the old cities of Greece and in the medieval cities of Italy-equalled under no other political conditions, but which in fact by its very intensity impaired the strength that alone could give it perma

nence.

The most striking political consequence of the vitality and the persistence of the devotion to city life is the limitation which it caused to the area of the little state, and the consequent inability to resist the attacks either of larger military nations or of combination of other cities. This difficulty was not felt either in Italy or Greece during the earlier centuries in the histories of the cities, so long indeed as the ideas on which they were based sufficed adequately for social and political requirements. But when the political activity, the ambition, and the enterprise, of the people began to outgrow the narrow limits of the City district, then the evil manifested itself. When a City by its wealth offered temptations to the attacks of enemies, or when its own ambition incited it to foreign enterprises, the weakness of the basis on which it had to rely became apparent. The years of greatest activity, marked by brilliance of internal culture, by fulness of political life, and by external operations, were comparatively few. From the battle of Marathon to the battle of Chaeroneia was only about 164 years, and from the first of these events to the capture of Athens by the Spartans was less than a single century. It was during this short period that Athens wrote in the living characters of events the most glorious chapter of history that the world has known, rich alike in political and social experience, in maritime and colonial experience, in history and artistic culture, in all forms indeed of private and public activity and progress. In Italy the

period of greatness was somewhat longer, but was still comparatively short. From the peace of Constance from which the best period of the independence of the Cities may be said to commence to the entry of Charles VIII. into Italy, when that country became instead of a series of nations only a battle field for foreign rival invaders and tyrants was about 300 years, and that period was broken up by intervals in which civic freedom for a time was crushed. Yet it was in Italy during that period that modern art, science, political and social, received the impulse of the new growth. As historical lessons the accounts of those three centuries of Italian life are invaluable. Sismondi-perhaps with some, but certainly with pardonable exaggeration says "the knowledge of times past is good only as it instructs us to avoid mistakes, to imitate virtues, to improve by experience: but the pre-eminent object of this study, the science of governing men for their advantage, of developing their individual faculties, intellectual and moral, for their greater happiness,-that political philosophy, began in modern Europe only with the Italian republics of the middle ages, and from them diffused itself over other nations."

If we attempt to judge the value of what we may call the city ideal of government by the short period during which its highest achievements were manifested, and to say that because it did not succeeed in establishing permanent nationalities, it failed in its great political object, we shall miss the chief lesson which it has to teach. We must look to the long ages preceding these years of crisis in which Cities formed the only possible nucleus of intelligent social and political life, and prepared mankind for that fuller and more far-reaching spirit of nationality, which may in its turn have to make way for an international federalism, which will remove still more of the limits which divide human sympathies and impede human progress. At the time of their greatness the Cities had brought their people up to the point when they felt the necessity for transcending the boundaries, which yet they were not prepared to destroy. The new spirit was working and striving to find embodiment in the old forms. We shall see in the case of

Rome the operation of this latent idea, and the way in which her rulers tried to maintain the supremacy of a City and yet create a vast empire.

But the action of these forces is of as much consequence to us in the moral as in the social sphere, it proves that the various departments of human life are part of one great whole, no section of which can be understood if another is neglected. The student and the philosopher are as wrong if they disregard the action of the political agencies of their time as the statesman would be if he left out of his calculation the influences of moral and intellectual progress in moulding the character of a people and therefore in affecting the destiny of a nation.

One condition not of the formation of Cities but of the state of social development at the time of their foundation which is of especial interest to the moralist, is the establishment or rather the perpetuation in them of the system of personal slavery. We are often warned when we speak of the political freedom and the individual dignity of the Citizens of Athens or any other ancient City that these blessings were enjoyed by only a portion of the inhabitants, large numbers being in a position of slavery, with no recognised rights as regarded either their persons or their property. This is true, and it is a drawback to the advantages of the institutions of which it formed a part, or rather we should say that it was one of the existing social conditions which neither the governments of cities nor any other government at the time felt it either necessary or desirable to abolish. It would be unfair to attribute to one particular political system a social condition common to all, or to refuse to see the advance in progress of all kinds of liberty and culture which accompanied the growth of Cities, because their inhabitants could not transcend the action of the natural laws of evolution to which all mankind was subject. We may lament that at the outset of its history the human race was not perfect in civilization, but that is a useless sorrow as well as a foolish one, it is in growth that the hope of the present and the possibility of the future consists.