The system of self-government thus introduced, as the natural fruit of the elements out of which it arose, would be a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with a decided predominance of the former element at starting, but with a gradually increasing momentum on the side of the inferior factor in proportion as the mass of the people excluded from aristocratic privileges by a necessary law of social growth advanced in numbers and in social importance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens and Rome, present to us here two types from which important lessons may be learned. In both the discarding of the kings was the work of the aristocracy; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, and a more characteristic manhood; whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy than a pure democracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both States the aristocratic element did not submit to the necessary curtailment of its power without a struggle; but in Athens the names of Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked the early formation of a democracy almost totally purged from any remnant of aristocratic influence, at an epoch in its development corresponding to which we find Rome pursuing her system of worldwide conquest under a system of compromise between the patrician and the plebeian element, similar in some sort to what we see before our eyes at the present moment in our own country. To Athens, therefore, we look, in the first place, for an answer to the question, What does history teach in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we may safely say that, under favourable circumstances, there is no form of government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as a pure democracy. Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing, the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent and civic efficiency in the greatest number of capable individuals; but it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed by any other form of government, it is therefore absolutely the best of all forms of government. All that we are warranted to say is, as Cornewall Lewis does,[9] that without a strong admixture of the democratic spirit humanity in its social form cannot achieve its highest results; of which truth, indeed, we have the most striking proof before our eyes in our own happy island, where, even before the time which Mr. Green happily designates as Puritan England, powerful kings had received