This difference was and is one of the greatest difficulties met with by European historians in the study of the ancient world. I am of opinion, for example, that this is one of the weakest points in Mommsen’s history. Accustomed to see bureaucratic states at work, European historians find it difficult to imagine how those states can have prospered in which the magistrates changed periodically, sometimes every year, and in which there was no professional division between the different functions. Instinctively, they tend also to paint the ancient state in the colours of the European state, attributing to it the same virtues and the same defects, and, therefore, representing its weaknesses as well as its merits in a false light. For an American, on the other hand, especially for a North American, the difficulty of understanding the ancient states is much less formidable. Certainly the principle of professional specialisation is much more highly developed in modern American society than it was in the ancient societies. Modern civilisation is nowadays too complex and too technical to admit of the principle of popular election being applied indiscriminately, as at Athens or Rome, to all the public offices. What sensible man would consent to-day, even in the purest of democracies, to the election of the admirals, for instance, by universal suffrage? Nevertheless, in the American confederation many of the public offices, which are now entrusted in Europe to the professional bureaucracy, are elective. And this fact by itself is enough to represent a distinct _rapprochement_ between American society and ancient society. For this reason, an inhabitant of New York can more easily than an inhabitant of London or Paris picture to himself certain aspects of the life of the Athens or Rome of ancient days; especially the continual and frequent succession of elections, and the complete change of interests and of directing forces involved in the change of the magistrates in office. It is true that we in Europe have periodical elections, as in America. Periodically, in the Old, as in the New World, the people assemble to exercise their sovereign right by means of the ballot. But if, regarded superficially, the act and the procedure are identical, their value and importance are different. The populace in the old states of Europe elect only consultative and legislative bodies, while the executive power remains to a great extent independent of the people, residing in a professional bureaucracy whose members cannot be changed from day to day. In America, on the contrary, as in ancient Athens and Rome, many of the magistrates who hold in their hands and exercise directly governing powers are periodically changed at the will of the people, which, therefore, moulds more directly the government and its different organs and more directly inspires and controls its particular functions, just as it used to control them in the ancient states.