We may console ourselves, however, for the premature overthrow of the power of Athens, by the reflection that that power rested upon political conditions which could not in any case have been permanent or even long-enduring. The entire political system of ancient Greece, based as it was upon the idea of the sovereign independence of each single city, was one which could not fail sooner or later to exhaust itself through chronic anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we might call "incorporation and assimilation," after the Roman fashion. But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with brilliant results in the early history 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 Græco-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.