story of Attika, involved such a
disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered
about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any
large or general scale. Schemes of federal union were put into
operation, though too late to be of avail against the assaults of
Macedonia and Rome. But as for the principle of representation, that
seems to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind; no statesman of
antiquity, either in Greece or at Rome, seems to have conceived the idea
of a city sending delegates armed with plenary powers to represent its
interests in a general legislative assembly. To the Greek statesmen, no
doubt, this too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity of the
sovereign city.

This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent
the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible
to the modern mind, so far removed are we from the political
circumstances which made such a feeling possible. Teutonic
civilization, indeed, has never passed through a stage in which the
foremost position has been held by civic communities. Teutonic
civilization passed directly from the stage of tribal into that of
national organization, before any Teutonic city had acquired sufficient
importance to have claimed autonomy for itself; and at the time when
Teutonic nationalities were forming, moreover, all the cities in Europe
had so long been accustomed to recognize a master outside of them in the
person of the Roman emperor that the very tradition of civic autonomy,
as it existed in ancient Greece, had become extinct. This difference
between the political basis of Teutonic and of Graeco-Roman civilization
is one of which it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance; and
when thoroughly understood it goes farther, perhaps, than anything else
towards accounting for the successive failures of the Greek and Roman
political systems, and towards inspiring us with confidence in the
future stability of the political system which has been wrought out by
the genius of the English race.

We saw, in the preceding lecture, how the most primitive form of
political association known to have existed is that of the _clan_, or
group of families held together by ties of descent from a common
ancestor. We saw how the change from a nomadic to a stationary mode of
life, attendant upon the adoption of agricultural pursuits, converted
the clan into a _mark_ or village-