Travelling backwards, the earliest democratic institutions known to Europe were those of Greece and Rome. In applying the term "democratic" to the city republics of Greece and Rome it is ignored that these "republics" were in no sense democratic. "Liberty," says Putnam Weale, "as it was understood in those two celebrated republics of Athens and Sparta meant abject slavery to the vast mass of the population, slavery every whit as cruel as any in the Southern States of the American Union before the war of Liberation.... In neither of these two republics did the freemen ever exceed twenty thousand, whilst the slaves ran into hundreds of thousands, and were used just as the slaves of Asiatics were used.[1] Thus the Greek republics were simply cities in which a certain portion of the inhabitants, little qualified to exercise them, had acquired exclusive privileges, while they kept the great body of their brethren in a state of abject slavery."[2] Discussing the nature of Roman citizenship Putnam Weale remarks (p. 25) that "in spite of the polite fiction of citizenship, the destinies of scores of millions were effectively disposed of by a few thousands." This was true not only with regard to the outlying parts of the Empire but even as to Italy itself. "Roman liberty," continues Putnam Weale, "though an improvement on Greek conceptions, was like all liberty of antiquity confined really to those who, being present in the capital, could take an active part in the public deliberations. It was the liberty of city and not of a land. It was therefore exactly similar in practise, if not in theory, to the kind of liberty, which has always been understood in advanced Asiatic states--the system of Government by equipoise and nothing else. The idea of giving those who lived at a distance from the capital any means of representing themselves was never considered at all; and so, it was the populace of the capital (or only a part of it), aided by such force as might be introduced by the contesting generals or leaders, which held all the actual political power. _Representative Government_--the only effective guarantee of liberty of any sort--_had therefore not yet been dreamt of_." [The italics are ours.]