Alison in his _History of Europe_, Vol. I, says: "The states of Florence, Genoa, Venice and Pisa were not in reality free; they were communities _in which a few individuals had usurped_ the rights, and disposed of the fortunes, of the great bulk _of their fellow citizens, whom they governed as subjects or indeed as slaves_. During the most flourishing period of their history, the citizens of all Italian republics did not amount to 20,000, and these privileged classes held as many million in subjection. The citizens of Venice were 2500 and those of Genoa 4500, those of Pisa, Siena, Lucca and Florence taken together, not above 6000." [Italics ours.] Coming to more modern times we find it stated by Morse Stephens in his _History of Revolutionary Europe_ that "the period which preceded the French Revolution and the era of war from the troubles of which Modern Europe was to be born may be characterised as that of the benevolent despots. The State was everything, the nation nothing." Speaking of the eighteenth-century conditions in Europe, Stephens remarks that "the great majority of the peasants of Europe were throughout that century absolute serfs"; also that "the mass of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was purely agricultural and in its poverty expected naught but the bare necessaries of existence. The cities and consequently the middle classes formed but an insignificant factor in the population." These quotations reveal the real character of the European democracy in ancient and mediæval and even in early modern Europe up to the end of the eighteenth century, or, to be more accurate, to the time of the French Revolution. Compare this with the following facts about the political institutions of India, during the ancient and mediæval times: (1) First we have the testimony of ancient Brahmanic and Buddhistic literature, preserved in their sacred books, about the right of the people to elect their rulers; the duty of the rulers to obey _the law_ and their obligation to consult their ministers as well as the representatives of the public in all important affairs of State. The Vedic literature contains references to non-monarchial forms of Government,[3] makes mention of elected rulers and of assemblies of people, though the normal as distinguished from universal form of Government according to Professor Macdonald was by Kings, "a situation which, as in the case of the Aryan invaders of Greece and of the German invaders of England, resulted almost necessarily in strengthening the monarchic element of the constitution."[4] In the _Aitreya Brahmana_ occur terms which are translated by some as representing the existence of "self-governed" and "kingless" states. These authorities have been collected, translated and explained by K. P. Jayas Wal and Narendranath Law in a series of articles published in the _Modern Review_ of Calcutta.