characteristic of the spirit of the organization and of the externals of the Church of Rome is a direct inheritance from the Empire. 2. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE Let us pass now to consider the relation which our political theories and institutions bear to those of Rome. A wise government aims to strike a judicious balance between the rights of the individual and the safety and welfare of the community. This happy mean can best be determined by watching the play of the two principles in concrete cases. Such an opportunity is offered to us by the history of the ancient city-state which sets before us examples in which the two ideals of government mentioned above are combined in varying degrees. These instances range from Athens which favored the freedom of the citizen to Delphi or Sparta which exalted the importance of the commonwealth. We owe also to the Greeks and Romans the discussion of another fundamental political problem and various attempts to solve it. Is the ideal state a state ruled by one person, by a few persons, or by all the citizens? This question was discussed with great acumen and learning by Greek writers on political theory, and their views with certain modifications have been transmitted to us by Cicero in his treatise _On the Commonwealth_. Indeed the merits and defects of all systems of government have been exemplified in the history of Rome itself, which ran through the entire gamut of governmental forms. The two most important Roman writers of the classical period on political theory were Cicero and Seneca. Unfortunately only a part of Cicero’s treatise _On the Laws_ has come down to us, and only fragments of his book _On the Commonwealth_ are extant, but these two works were known in their entirety to the early Roman jurists and to the Christian Fathers, and have exerted a great influence on them, and through them, upon us. Even in their present fragmentary form they show us what an important contribution Cicero has made to political philosophy. Quite outside the fact that he served as an intermediary between Greek political thinking and that of our own times, his two works are of great value to us, both because of Cicero’s method of approaching the subject of the state and because of his conception of the organization of society. Most of Cicero’s predecessors, with the exception of Panaetius and Polybius, direct their attention to the ideal state, to an imaginary commonwealth. Cicero in his _Commonwealth, De Re Publica_, II. 1. 3, tells us that it is his purpose to study the Roman state “in its birth, its growth, its maturity, and in its present strength and vigor.” In other words he introduces the modern method of studying the organization of actual states, and we have set forth, perhaps for the first time, the fruitful conception of the state as an organism.