When then we compare the colonial system of modern times, like any other feature of modern political life, with the thing answering to it in the political life of the old Greek city-commonwealths, we must never forget the difference of area on which the political life of the two periods has been acted; but we must never allow ourselves to fancy that difference of area, any more than distance of time, wholly shuts us off from political fellowship with those earlier times or makes their experience of none effect for our political instruction. The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. The Greek settlements, like the Phœnician settlements before them, were settlements of cities, not of nations, not of kingdoms or of commonwealths on the scale of kingdoms. Till the political needs of a later age taught the Greek that several cities might be combined in a federal union, his whole political life had gathered round the single independent city as its essential unit. Every Greek city was not independent; but every Greek city deemed itself wronged if it was not independent; when its independence was lost, it was, within all Hellenic lands, lost by the rule of city over city. And the rule of city over city, if it took away the independence of the subject city as an equal power among other powers, did not wipe out its essential character as a separate city-commonwealth. The dependent city was not incorporated like an annexed land; it was not held in bondage like a subject province; it remained a city, with more or less of freedom in its local affairs, though bound, as against other powers, to follow the lead of the ruling city. The city was all in all; the smallness of the community, the narrowness of its area, brought every citizen face to face with his fellows and his leaders; it brought with it a fulness of political life, an extension of political power and political interests to every citizen, to which larger states have reached only by painful steps and by help of the inventions which have in some sort made time and distance cease to be. The Greek was before all things a citizen; his political life was wholly local; his powers and duties as a citizen could be discharged only in his own city, on some spot hallowed by old tradition, and hallowed most commonly in the more formal sense by the abiding presence and guardianship of the patron deity. He felt in the strongest sense the tie of membership of a community, the tie of all the duties which spring from membership of a community. For his city he would live and toil and die, but he would live and toil and die for it, because it was the whole of which he was himself a part. He owed faith and loyalty to his city--loyalty in its true and ancient sense of obeying the law, the law which he might be called on to help to