often enough
commented on by historians. On the one hand the democratic assembly of
such an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of political training
superior to anything else that the world has ever seen. It was something
like what the New England town-meeting would be if it were continually
required to adjust complicated questions of international polity, if it
were carried on in the very centre or point of confluence of all
contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in the habit every few
days of listening to statesmen and orators like Hamilton or Webster,
jurists like Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell,
historians like Parkman. Nothing in all history has approached the
high-wrought intensity and brilliancy of the political life of Athens.

On the other hand, the smallness of the independent city, as a political
aggregate, made it of little or no use in diminishing the liability to
perpetual warfare which is the curse of all primitive communities. In a
group of independent cities, such as made up the Hellenic world, the
tendency to warfare is almost as strong, and the occasions for warfare
are almost as frequent, as in a congeries of mutually hostile tribes of
barbarians. There is something almost lurid in the sharpness of contrast
with which the wonderful height of humanity attained by Hellas is set
off against the fierce barbarism which characterized the relations of
its cities to one another. It may be laid down as a general rule that in
an early state of society, where the political aggregations are small,
warfare is universal and cruel. From the intensity of the jealousies and
rivalries between adjacent self-governing groups of men, nothing short
of chronic warfare can result, until some principle of union is evolved
by which disputes can be settled in accordance with general principles
admitted by all. Among peoples that have never risen above the tribal
stage of aggregation, such as the American Indians, war is the normal
condition of things, and there is nothing fit to be called
_peace_,--there are only truces of brief and uncertain duration. Were it
not for this there would be somewhat less to be said in favour of great
states and kingdoms. As modern life grows more and more complicated and
interdependent, the Great State subserves innumerable useful purposes;
but in the history of civilization its first service, both in order of
time and in order of importance, consists in the dim