It seems to us that Hegel, in his anxiety to crush every historical process into the narrow symmetry of a favourite metaphysical formula, has confounded several entirely distinct conceptions under the common name of subjectivity. First, there is the right of private judgment, the claim of each individual to have a voice in the affairs of the State, and to have the free management of his own personal concerns. But this, so far from being modern, is one of the oldest customs of the Aryan race; and perhaps, could we look back to the oldest history of other races now despotically governed, we should find it prevailing among them also. It was no new nor unheard-of privilege that Rousseau vindicated for the peoples of his own time, but their ancient birthright, taken from them by the growth of a centralised military system, just as it had been formerly taken from the city communities of the Graeco-Roman world. In this respect, Plato goes against the whole spirit of his country, and no period of its development, not even the age of Homer, would have satisfied him. We have next the disposition of individuals, no longer to interfere in making the law, but to override it, or to bend it into an instrument for their own purposes. Doubtless there existed such a tendency in Plato’s time, and his polity was very largely designed to hold it in check. But such unprincipled ambition was nothing new in Greece, however the mode of its manifestations might vary. What had formerly been seized by armed violence was now sought after with the more subtle weapons of rhetorical skill; just as at the present moment, among these same Greeks, it is the prize of parliamentary intrigue. The Cretan and Spartan institutions may very possibly have been designed with a view to checking this spirit of selfish lawlessness, by reducing private interests to a minimum; and Plato most certainly had them in his mind when he pushed the same method still further; but those institutions were not types of Hellenism as a whole, they only represented one, and that a very abnormal, side of it. Plato borrowed some elements from this quarter, but, as we shall presently show, he incorporated them with others of a widely different character. Sparta was, indeed, on any high theory of government, not a State at all, but a robber-clan established among a plundered population whom they never tried or cared to conciliate. How little weight her rulers attributed to the interests of the State as such, was well exhibited during the Peloponnesian War, when political advantages of the utmost importance were surrendered in deference to the noble families whose kinsmen had been captured at Sphactêria, and whose sole object was to rescue them from the fate with which they were threatened by the Athenians as a means of extorting concessions;—conduct with which the refusal of Rome to ransom the soldiers who had surrendered at Cannae may be instructively contrasted.