When we inquire into the causes that made politics so developed a feature among the Greeks, we shall in the first place find, even in Homer’s societies, the habit of open discussion a leading fact in everyday life. There is a sort of instinct to have things talked over and reasoned out, so much so that the very king, who has come to a decision with his council, and has ample authority to fulfil it, will not do so without calling together an assembly of the soldiers in the camp or the free citizens in the market-place, and seeking to obtain their approval by acclamation. This assembly, called together to approve, without any power of voting or of reversing the prince’s decision, is regarded by all historians as the embryo of the long-subsequent sovran assemblies of citizens in every Greek democracy. There seem even to have been assertions of absolute power in the mouth of the kings in some of the old texts of the _Iliad_, which were expunged by editors, certainly not those of Alexandria, to whom such an assertion could contain no offence, but by earlier editors who prepared the poems for the free cities of Greece.[38] The next stimulant to the development of politics was the coexistence of many small city-states, with only a few miles square of territory, each a little sovranty where no king could maintain the mystery of seclusion or the obstacle of a solemn etiquette, which Xenophon perceived to be essential conditions of the great absolute monarchy of the Persians. So it came that the old sovranties, which Aristotle tells us had been hereditary and limited[39] as it were a model to later nations in constitutional sovranty, passed away, often without revolution, into aristocracies, which were the leading type throughout the civilised world both in classical and in mediæval times, so long as the mass of the people were too ignorant to take upon them the management of public affairs. Aristotle tells us that the masses easily remain quiet and contented, provided they are kept in employment and in comfort by the good management of the few. Such an example you are all familiar with in the Venetian Republic, which, like Carthage of old, maintained for a long period, without serious internal disturbance, a considerable empire with a population busy and rich by their trade.