The very same problem assumed a slightly different form when twelve insignificant Achæan cities combined into the Achæan League which Polybius has made so famous. The council and governing officers were elected in an assembly convened in one of the cities, whither all the members of the League were entitled to go, but which of course only men of leisure could afford to attend. Moreover each city had one collective vote, so that numbers were of no direct consequence. The meetings were confined to three days, and to business prepared for them by the executive. The whole scheme (which was an early and excellent essay in Federation, much studied by the founders of the American Union) shipwrecked on the question whether single states had a right to enter into separate agreements with powers foreign to the League. Perfect internal independence was of course essential to Greek ideas, but that the power of separate alliances with foreign powers should be allowed, seems to us absurd. Nevertheless the sentiment of the Greeks here as elsewhere was in favour of this absolute independence, and so the League was pulled to pieces by the interference of jealous or ambitious neighbours. Thus you have a conglomerate of civilised communities, all speaking the same language and with similar ideals of culture, not separated by hostile creeds, and with the power, when united, of exercising a dominant influence upon the world around them; and yet their power and their development are paralysed by mutual jealousies and constant quarrels, resulting in frequent and desolating wars. We have no cases in Europe at all parallel except the condition of Italy in the Renaissance and of Germany in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy and we travelled in a carriage through that country (railways had not yet been introduced) we used in the course of a day to pass through a whole principality and across a border with custom houses, and a new flag, and often a new coinage. There were then, I believe, sixty-six reigning personages--grand dukes, electors, etc.--in Germany. You know how all were either absorbed or reduced to one empire, or allowed to live on as vassal states, to use rather a hard word, within the compass of a few years. That was what happened ultimately in Greece, where the Macedonian power played a part analogous to that of Prussia, and made itself by a successful war against a foreign power not only accepted but popular. The important point in which Greece gives modern nations a further lesson is this; Revolutionary or extemporised monarchies in such a case will not succeed. The Greeks, especially in Asia Minor and in Sicily, where there was danger from foreign powers, had come to the conclusion that a monarch was necessary to combine them into a strong military and financial power, and they were therefore again willing to submit themselves to tyrants or despots, as they had been of old, when they