Where the violence or the selfishness of the few in power who were descendants of the old families of nobles which had once been the council of the kings, or who had themselves been local chiefs--where, I say, the neglect or violence of these men produced intolerable hardships, we have sanguinary revolutions, at first usually under the leadership of an ambitious renegade or soldier of noble origin, who set the masses against the classes. Later, the masses were strong enough to make their revolutions by constitutional or semi-constitutional means, and so gained a political power which they could seldom maintain without putting to death or exiling the leaders of the nobles. A reader of Thucydides or Xenophon will recall the manner in which the exiles worked counter-revolutions, and thus stained the face of Greece with violence and bloodshed. These scenes of violence play so large a part in our Greek histories that you will wonder how any such people could be a model to others in methods of politics, and it is for that reason that I think it necessary to notice the matter. When we look below the surface we shall find that there were elements of order never eradicated, and that the crimes of the leaders of society did not infect the common-sense, or destroy the safety, of the mass of the people, until the general decadence in the days of Polybius and the Roman interference. What is this evidence? It is not to be found without some reflection, for, as I have said, it is below the surface. There is no commoner phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutionists, or in the mouth of those that dreaded them, than “abolition of debts, and redivision of the land.”[40] Aristotle mentions these as the watchword of the mob-leaders. But when I was asked, years ago, by the late Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge, to find him actual instances of such a revolution in authentic Greek history, I well remember my own surprise, and his also, when I said there were none to be found. Some such things may possibly have happened in the great Sicilian troubles, when a tyrant drove out the old free population, and settled a town with the surrounding churls and his mercenary troops; but on the general face of Greek history, and in the records of the well known states, you will not find an instance.[41] The most radical measure to which I can point is the reduction of debts twenty-seven per cent. by Solon, who was a very conservative statesman, and one most anxious to guard the mercantile good character of his city. As there was no loss of public credit to Athens in his time, it is clear that the debts lightened by this exceptional proceeding must have been only the debts of a class, probably those due from poor farmers or labourers to their oppressive landlords. If so, it was not more trenchant than the present land legislation of the English Government in Ireland and Scotland, where the annual rents of tenants have, in violation of old and formal private