A second result which flows from the small-scale character of Greek politics is that we nowhere find an adequate treatment of the problem of _foreign relations_. Foreign policy is one of the weak spots of modern democracy; it is, perhaps, the element in our political technique which is most in need of thoroughgoing revision. We have yet to induce the modern citizen to pay continuous attention to issues which, although they are seemingly remote from his purview, may at any moment shake the whole fabric of his everyday existence; and, when we have done this, we have to persuade him to approach these world-problems not in the spirit of a competitive aggrandizement but with a view to discovering what is the best line of policy in the interests of the world as a whole. So long as the peoples remain self-absorbed, the governments will continue to conduct their mutual relations on a basis of individual self-interest, and the meetings of the Assembly of the League of Nations will remain what they are at present, not gatherings of statesmen solely bent, each from his own angle and upbringing, on the welfare of humanity, but barterings of politicians who (with rare exceptions) have come to the fair to do the best business they can for their own clients. Now Thucydides and Plato give us no help for the League of Nations. Such a phrase as 'the interests of humanity as a whole' would have been politically meaningless to them. They did not think of humanity as a whole; they thought of it as divided sharply into two sections, Greeks and Barbarians, and of the Greek world as a small oasis of intelligence and culture ringed round by a wide and indefinite expanse of barbarism. We also, it is true, speak of 'advanced' and 'backward' peoples: but the latter are not, as they were to the Greeks, a formidable mass, tribe upon tribe, of military power extending up to and beyond the known or legendary confines of the world; they are child-races under our watchful care and control. We have explored and surveyed the whole earth, and where we find weakness or inferiority, we establish a trusteeship. To the Greeks, ever on their guard against barbarian inroads from north, south, east and west, from Scythians and Libyans, Persians and Carthaginians, the mandate clause of the Covenant would have seemed both theoretically undesirable and practically impossible. No Greek writer ever dreamed of a system of international co-operation between the governments of the world as men then knew it. All of them thought in terms of competition and ever-recurrent warfare or, at best, of a precarious balance of power. Even Plato's Utopia had its soldier class; and they were real soldiers, not merely police. In this respect, at any rate, vanquished Germany, with practically the whole of her population relieved from military duty and available for productive tasks, has the advantage over the most ideal construction of ancient Greece.