I am not now dealing in vague conjecture; the history of the past will bear me out in the assertions which I have made. In casting a glance over the nations of antiquity, our attention is arrested by none so forcibly as by the little Democracies of Greece. I will not occupy the attention of this society by the details of that history which is graven upon the memory of us all. I will not stop here to relate the warlike achievements of that extraordinary system of governments which, covering an extent of territory not greater than that of our own state, even with division among themselves, was yet enabled to meet, with their small but devoted bands, the countless hosts of Persia, led on by their proud and vain-glorious monarch, and to roll back in disgrace and defeat, the mighty tide upon the East. Nor will I recount the trophies which they won in philosophy, or describe their beautiful and sublime productions in the arts, which they at once created and perfected. Nor will I detain you with an account of that matchless eloquence displayed in their popular assemblies, which the historian tells us drew together eager, gazing, listening crowds from all Greece, as if about to behold the most splendid spectacle which the imagination of man could conceive, or even the universe could present. The history of Greece is too well known to us all to require these details. A people with such historians as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, acquires a strange pre-eminence--a wonderful notoriety among the nations of the earth. The extraordinary power of this cluster of little states, the superiority of their literature, the resistless energy of the minds and bodies of their citizens, whether for weal or woe--in short, their real greatness, are acknowledged by all.