consequence would be the loss of that country, and of course of our Mediterranean trade. We should be sorry to set all our slaves free in our plantations.’” The prodigious sum of damages awarded by the jury, shows the strength of their sympathy with this Minorquin plaintiff against the English officer. I doubt not that the feeling of the dikastery at Athens was much of the same kind, and often quite as strong; sincerely disposed to protect the subject-allies against misconduct of Athenian trierarchs, or inspectors. The feelings expressed in the speech above cited would also often find utterance from Athenian orators in the assembly; and it would not be difficult to produce parallel passages, in which these orators imply discontent on the part of the allies to be the natural state of things, such as Athens could not hope to escape. The speech here given shows that such feelings arise, almost inevitably, out of the uncomfortable relation of two governments, one supreme and the other subordinate. They are not the product of peculiar cruelty and oppression on the part of the Athenian democracy, as Mr. Mitford and so many others have sought to prove. Nearly the whole of the Grecian world, putting aside Italian, Sicilian, and African Greeks, was at this time included either in the alliance of Lacedæmon or in that of Athens, so that the truce of thirty years insured a suspension of hostilities everywhere. Moreover, the Lacedæmonian confederates had determined by majority of votes to refuse the request of Samos for aid in her revolt against Athens: whereby it seemed established, as practical international law, that neither of these two great aggregate bodies should intermeddle with the other, and that each should restrain or punish its own disobedient members.[92] Of this refusal, which materially affected the course of events, the main advisers had been the Corinthians, in spite of that fear and dislike of Athens which prompted many of the allies to vote for war.[93] The position of the Corinthians was peculiar; for while Sparta and her other allies were chiefly land-powers, Corinth had been from early times maritime, commercial, and colonizing,—she had been indeed once the first naval power in Greece, along with Ægina; but either she had not increased it at all during the last forty years, or, if she had, her comparative naval importance had been entirely sunk by the gigantic expansion of Athens. The Corinthians had both commerce and colonies,—Leukas, Anaktorium, Ambrakia, Korkyra, etc., along or near the coast of Epirus: they had also their colony Potidæa, situated on the isthmus of Pallênê, in Thrace, and intimately connected with them: and the interest of their commerce made them extremely averse to any collision with the superior navy of the Athenians. It was this consideration which had induced them to resist the impulse of the Lacedæmonian allies towards war on behalf of Samos: for though their