The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of city-states was strung. The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just salt and still and dead. But as soon as we study the sea, we find movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. And as these surface-waters are drawn off into the clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the depths. The sea itself is in constant and creative motion, but the influence of this great body of water extends far beyond its shores. One finds it softening the extremes of temperature, quickening the vegetation, and prospering the life of animals and men, in the distant heart of continents and among peoples that have never heard its name. ARNOLD TOYNBEE. POLITICAL THOUGHT In a survey of the legacy of Ancient Greece to our modern civilization and its problems, it might well seem at first sight as though the political contribution of Greece could be ignored. Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy are among the world's abiding possessions, for the human passions and questionings which gave them birth and the human needs to which they minister will last as long as human life itself. But Greek political thinking is so much bound up with the peculiar and evanescent external conditions of fifth and fourth century Greece, centres indeed so exclusively round the special problems of its intellectual metropolis, Athens, that its interest might appear to have passed away with the régime to which it owes its existence. The _Agamemnon_ and the _Antigone_, with their teachings of destiny and duty, the Hermes of Olympia and the Parthenon frieze, with their ever-irresistible charm of youthfulness, the _Phaedo_ with its discussion of immortality, the _Metaphysics_ of Aristotle with their still subtler and more abstruse speculations, source of so much of our Christian doctrine and apologetic--all these require little defence against the Philistine of to-day, if only he can be induced to gaze at his intended victim before he delivers his blow. But Thucydides with his long and detailed account of an inter-tribal or inter-municipal war, decked out with sham speeches which were never delivered: Plato with his imaginary Utopia, half a small Greek provincial town, half an impossible and unendurably regimented socialist model community, based on a fine-drawn and fallacious comparison between the qualities of the human soul and the class-divisions which happened to prevail in the Greek