The position of Nikias in reference to the measure is remarkable. As a dissuasive and warning counsellor, he took a right view of it; but in that capacity he could not carry the people along with him. Yet such was their steady esteem for him personally, and their reluctance to proceed in the enterprise without him, that they eagerly embraced any conditions which he thought proper to impose. And the conditions which he named had the effect of exaggerating the enterprise into such gigantic magnitude as no one in Athens had ever contemplated; thus casting into it so prodigious a proportion of the blood of Athens, that its discomfiture would be equivalent to the ruin of the commonwealth. This was the first mischief occasioned by Nikias, when, after being forced to relinquish his direct opposition, he resorted to the indirect manœuvre of demanding more than he thought the people would be willing to grant. It will be found only the first among a sad series of other mistakes, fatal to his country as well as to himself. Giving to Nikias, however, for the present, full credit for the wisdom of his dissuasive counsel and his skepticism about the reports from Egesta, we cannot but notice the opposite quality in Alkibiadês. His speech is not merely full of overweening insolence, as a manifestation of individual character, but of rash and ruinous instigations in regard to the foreign policy of his country. The arguments whereby he enforces the expedition against Syracuse are indeed more mischievous in their tendency than the expedition itself, for the failure of which Alkibiades is not to be held responsible. It might have succeeded in its special object, had it been properly conducted; but even if it had succeeded, the remark of Nikias is not the less just, that Athens was aiming at an unmeasured breadth of empire, which it would be altogether impossible for her to preserve. When we recollect the true political wisdom with which Periklês had advised his countrymen to maintain strenuously their existing empire, but by no means to grasp at any new acquisitions while they had powerful enemies in Peloponnesus, we shall appreciate by contrast the feverish system of never-ending aggression inculcated by Alkibiadês, and the destructive principles which he lays down, that Athens must forever be engaged in new conquests, on pain of forfeiting her existing empire and tearing herself to pieces by internal discord. Even granting the necessity for Athens to employ her military and naval force, as Nikias had truly observed, Amphipolis and the revolted subjects in Thrace were still unsubdued; and the first employment of Athenian force ought to be directed against them, instead of being wasted in distant hazards and treacherous novelties, creating for Athens a position in which she could never permanently maintain herself. The parallel which Alkibiadês draws, between the enterprising spirit whereby the Athenian empire had been first acquired, and the undefined