Our larger political experience has taught us to modify this opinion by showing that, under the conditions of monarchy in the best governments of modern Europe, the enormities described by Herodotus do not take place,—and that it is possible, by means of representative constitutions acting under a certain force of manners, customs, and historical recollection, to obviate many of the mischiefs likely to flow from proclaiming the duty of peremptory obedience to an hereditary and unresponsible king, who cannot be changed without extra-constitutional force. But such larger observation was not open to Aristotle, the wisest as well as the most cautious of ancient theorists; nor if it had been open, could he have applied with assurance its lessons to the governments of the single cities of Greece. The theory of a constitutional king, especially as it exists in England, would have appeared to him impracticable: to establish a king who will reign without governing,—in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no effect,—exempt from all responsibility, without making use of the exemption,—receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act except within the bounds of a known law,—surrounded with all the paraphernalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king: the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen,—but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. To Aristotle, certainly, it could not have appeared otherwise than unintelligible and impracticable: not likely even in a single case,—but altogether inconceivable as a permanent system and with all the diversities of temper inherent in the successive members of an hereditary dynasty. When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsibility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions;[15] and their fear and hatred of him was measured by their reverence for a government of equal law and free speech, with the ascendency of which their whole hopes of security were associated,—in the democracy of Athens more perhaps than in any other portion of Greece. And this feeling, as it was one of the best in the Greek mind, so it was also one of the most widely spread,—a point of unanimity highly valuable amidst so many points of dissension. We cannot construe or criticize it by reference