always inseparable, to
determine under what conditions it advances or retards the progress of
the people and the welfare of free states, there is no better course
than to follow Sir Erskine May upon the road which he has been the first
to open.

In the midst of an invincible despotism, among paternal, military, and
sacerdotal monarchies, the dawn rises with the deliverance of Israel out
of bondage, and with the covenant which began their political life. The
tribes broke up into smaller communities, administering their own
affairs under the law they had sworn to observe, but which there was no
civil power to enforce. They governed themselves without a central
authority, a legislature, or a dominant priesthood; and this polity,
which, under the forms of primitive society, realised some aspirations
of developed democracy, resisted for above three hundred years the
constant peril of anarchy and subjugation. The monarchy itself was
limited by the same absence of a legislative power, by the submission of
the king to the law that bound his subjects, by the perpetual appeal of
prophets to the conscience of the people as its appointed guardian, and
by the ready resource of deposition. Later still, in the decay of the
religious and national constitution, the same ideas appeared with
intense energy, in an extraordinary association of men who lived in
austerity and self-denial, rejected slavery, maintained equality, and
held their property in common, and who constituted in miniature an
almost perfect Republic. But the Essenes perished with the city and the
Temple, and for many ages the example of the Hebrews was more
serviceable to authority than to freedom. After the Reformation, the
sects that broke resolutely with the traditions of Church and State as
they came down from Catholic times, and sought for their new
institutions a higher authority than custom, reverted to the memory of a
commonwealth founded on a voluntary contract, on self-government,
federalism, equality, in which election was preferred to inheritance,
and monarchy was an emblem of the heathen; and they conceived that there
was no better model for themselves than a nation constituted by
religion, owning no lawgiver but Moses, and obeying no king but God.
Political thought had until then been guided by pagan experience.

Among the Greeks, Athens, the boldest pioneer of republican discovery,
was the only democracy that prospered. It underwent the changes that
were