railways and telegraphs, let us rather say that printing and railways and telegraphs were needed to raise large states to the level of small ones. By means of those inventions the Englishman of our day has become far more like an Athenian of the age of Periklês than his forefathers were in any earlier time. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the utmost the ordinary Englishman could do was now and then to give a vote, if he chanced to have one, at a parliamentary election, and to read or hear the most meagre accounts of what was going on in Parliament and elsewhere in public life. Very few Englishmen ever saw or heard Walpole or Pulteney, Pitt or Fox. Now the whole land has well-nigh become a single city; we see and hear our leading men almost daily; they walk before us as the leaders of the Athenian democracy walked before their fellow-citizens; they take us into their counsels; they appeal to us as their judges; we have in short a share in political life only less direct than the share of the Athenian freeman, a share which our forefathers, even two or three generations back, never dreamed of. But without the help of modern scientific discoveries, this active share in public affairs on the part of the mass of the inhabitants of a large country would have been simply a dream. Or look at a matter which more directly concerns the immediate subject of this discourse, look at the vast developement of English political life in the great English land beyond the Ocean; can any man believe that a hundred years back Maine, Florida, and California could have been kept together as a political whole by any power short of a despotism? Could those distant lands have acted as parts of one free political body, if they had had no means of intercourse with one another swifter than the speed of a horse? It is by the help of modern discoveries that the federal systems of old Greece can be reproduced on a gigantic scale, that a single Union of states can embrace a continent stretching from Ocean to Ocean instead of a peninsula stretching from sea to sea. In short, instead of despising those ancient communities which were the earliest form of European political life, we should rejoice that in many things we have gone back to the earliest form of European political life, that the discoveries of modern times have enabled the free states of old times to arise again, but to arise again, no longer on the scale of cities but on the scale of nations.