But a far larger and more philosophical objection may be based upon the consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a supply of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own permanently against an agricultural population fighting, not for pay, but for the defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriotism. If you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan, you destroy the backbone of your fighting power; and no outlay will secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides' day; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather than native[113:1]; and on this he bases his anticipation that the army of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military and naval power. [Sidenote: Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops.] § 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in those days, that mercenary forces could be kept at sea more permanently than a body of farmers, who must go home frequently to look after their subsistence and work their fields. This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbulent and unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating assembly[114:1]. [Sidenote: The smaller States necessarily separatists.] The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal; and his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so long as these were _subjects_, liable to oppression in any moment of panic or of passion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion, since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and the love of separatism in their small States. I fancy that at no period in the world's history could any small communities have easily been persuaded to submit to this kind of union, which was built on far too narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost exclusive benefit of the leading city.