was
no legal limit, there was a practical limit to subjection in (what may
be called) the pagan part of human nature--the inseparable obstinacy of
freemen. They NEVER would do exactly what they were told.

To early royalty, as Homer describes it in Greece and as we may well
imagine it elsewhere, there were always two adjuncts: one the "old
men," the men of weight, the council, the _boule_, of which the king
asked advice, from the debates in which the king tried to learn what he
could do and what he ought to do. Besides this there was the _agora_,
the purely listening assembly, as some have called it, but the
TENTATIVE assembly, as I think it might best be called. The king came
down to his assembled people in form to announce his will, but in
reality, speaking in very modern words, to "feel his way". He was
sacred, no doubt; and popular, very likely; still he was half like a
popular Premier speaking to a high-spirited chamber; there were limits
to his authority and power--limits which he would discover by trying
whether eager cheers received his mandate, or only hollow murmurs and a
thinking silence.

This polity is a good one for its era and its place, but there is a
fatal defect in it. The reverential associations upon which the
government is built are transmitted according to one law, and the
capacity needful to work the government is transmitted according to
another law. The popular homage clings to the line of god-descended
kings; it is transmitted by inheritance. But very soon that line comes
to a child or an idiot, or one by some defect or other incapable. Then
we find everywhere the truth of the old saying, that liberty thrives
under weak princes; then the listening assembly begins not only to
murmur, but to speak; then the grave council begins not so much to
suggest as to inculcate, not so much to advise as to enjoin.

Mr. Grote has told at length how out of these appendages of the
original kingdom the free States of Greece derived their origin, and
how they gradually grew--the oligarchical States expanding the council,
and the democratical expanding the assembly. The history has as many
varieties in detail as there were Greek cities, but the essence is the
same everywhere. The political characteristic of the early Greeks, and
of the early Romans, too, is that out of the tentacula of a monarchy
they developed the organs of a republic.

English history has been in substance the same, though its form is
diff