De Tocqueville, balancing somewhat inconclusively, because always _in vacuo_, the forces affecting literature in aristocratic and democratic societies, says decisively enough (_Démocratie en Amérique_, ed. 1850, ii, 62-63) that "Toute aristocratie qui se met entièrement à part du peuple devient impuissante. Cela est vrai dans les lettres aussi bien qu'en politique." This holds clearly enough of Italian literature in the despotic period. Mr. Godkin's criticism (_Problems of Modern Democracy_, p. 56) that "M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy," is hardly accurate. De Tocqueville puts the case judicially enough, so far as he goes; and Mr. Godkin falls into strange extravagance in his counter statement that there is "hardly a single historical work composed prior to the end of the last [eighteenth] century, except perhaps Gibbon's, which, judged by the standard that the criticism of our day has set up, would not, though written for the 'few,' be pronounced careless, slipshod, or superficial." Tillemont, by the testimony of Professor Bury, was a more thorough worker in his special line than Gibbon. It would be easy to name scores of writers in various branches of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whom no good critic to-day would call careless or slipshod; and if Hume and Robertson, Clarendon and Burnet, be termed superficial, the "standard" will involve a similar characterisation of most historical writers of our own day. As regards present-day literary productions, De Tocqueville and Mr. Godkin alike omit the necessary economic analysis. (13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation, properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed by _specialisation_ of pursuits; and such specialisation was not necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large _free_ population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147] In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of superstition and anti-culture.