The decline of vitality and initiative pervaded all spheres of life. There were no inventions and little industrial or agricultural progress of any kind. Literature degenerated into rhetoric: “In the same manner,” says Longinus, “as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted.”[51] The growing states of the earlier world were confronted, whether they knew it or not, with an irreconcilable opposition between freedom and expansion. They might retain in small areas those simple and popular institutions which nearly all the great peoples started with, and to which they owed their vigor; or they could organize on a larger scale a more mechanical unity. In the first case their careers were brief, because they lacked the military force to ensure permanence in a hostile world. In the latter they incurred, by the suppression of human nature, that degeneracy which sooner or later overtook every great state of antiquity. In some such way as this we may, perhaps, dispose of the innumerable instances which history shows of the failure of free organization—as in the decay of ancient and mediæval city republics. Not only was their freedom of an imperfect nature at the best, but they were too small to hold their own in a world that was necessarily, for the most part, autocratic or customary. Freedom, though in itself a principle of strength, was on too little a scale to defend itself. “If a republic be small,” said Montesquieu, “it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it be large it is ruined by internal imperfection.”[52] But how splendid, in literature, in art, and even in arms, were many of these failures. How well did Athens, Florence and a hundred other cities illustrate the intrinsic strength and fecundity of that free principle to which modern conditions permit an indefinite expansion. The present epoch, then, brings with it a larger and, potentially at least, a higher and freer consciousness. In the individual aspect of life this means that each one of us has, as a rule, a wider grasp of situations, and is thus in a position to give a wider application to his intelligence, sympathy and conscience. In proportion as he does this he ceases to be a blind agent and becomes a rational member of the whole. Because of this more conscious relation to the larger wholes—nations, institutions, tendencies—he takes a more vital and personal part in them. His self-feeling attaches itself, as its nature is, to the object of his free activity, and he tends to feel that “love of the maker for his work,” that spiritual identification of the member with the whole, which is the ideal of organization.