[VOL III BOOK V CONTINUED: CH. IV]

I. We have traced the rise of the Athenian commonwealth-we have now before us its meridian and decline. In the Peloponnesian war we approach

events not more memorable in the annals of the ancient world, than instructive to the societies of the modern. For as it has

been justly said, “there is an ancient and a modern period in the History of every People, the ancient differing, and the modern in many essential points agreeing with that in which we live”.4 In Greece then, as through Europe now, a great popular spirit was at work. To the earlier times, when aristocracy protects freedom from the single tyrant, to the later æra of civilization when wealth becomes the innovating principle and enfeebles by extending the privileges of nobility and birth, now succeeded the graver struggle between property and numbers-that struggle which has produced the greatest calamities in the past, and with which unreasoning fanaticism and speculative philosophy have alike threatened the futures of existing nations. Whatever our several opinions and predilections, we can only profit by the lessons which the history of this struggle in the most brilliant period of Grecian civilization should bestow, by preserving the disproportionate judgment which distinguishes the guide who bequeathed to mankind the narrative of the Peloponnesian war-κτµα ς α ε—“an everlasting possession”, not to subserve the aims of malignant partisans, but to enrich the experience of every statesman and warn the factions of every land.