Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England. Freeman Edward Augustus
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Hellênes. In the case of our own settlements, the spread of British settlement or dominion has meant either the gradual dying out of the native races, as in America or Australia, or else, as in India, their survival as a distinct and subject people. In no case have English settlers mingled to any important extent with the native races; in no case have the natives to any great extent put on the outward seeming of Englishmen. Something more like this result has taken place in the colonies of Spain. There the mingled race, the natives of unmixed race who have adopted at least the Spanish tongue, are important elements which have nothing answering to them in the colonies of England. The nearest approach to these elements to be found in any English colony must be looked for in the grotesque imitation of English ways where real assimilation is impossible. This we see, not on the part of the barbarians whom the English settlers found dwelling in the settled lands, but on the part of another race of barbarians whom they afterwards imported for their own ends. The negro of the Western continent and islands has truly nothing answering to him in any part of the Hellenic world. And, in the other case, while the process which made Sicily and Southern Italy Greek was mainly the raising of the older inhabitants to a higher level, the process which has made a large part of America in some sort Spanish has been largely the sinking of the European settler to a lower level. In the Greek and in the English case, it has been the higher civilization of the time that has been extended, and that by milder means in the Greek case than in the English. In the Spanish case we can hardly say that the highest civilization has been extended. If one race has risen, the other has fallen. This result nowhere took place in the Greek settlements, even where the Greek settlers, while communicating so much to the older inhabitants, did adopt something from them back again. On the whole, the work was a work of raising, not of sinking; but it is needful to remember that, when we speak of the narrow peninsulas of Southern Italy becoming Greek from sea to sea, we mean that they largely became Greek by the adoption of the earlier inhabitants into the Greek body. When we speak of the vast mainland of North America becoming wholly European, mainly English, from Ocean to Ocean, we mean that it has become so, not by the adoption of the earlier people by invaders who were also teachers, but by the gradual vanishing of the earlier people before invaders who to them at least have been destroyers.
Now this difference is one that follows directly from the difference in scale between the world in which the old Greek settlers lived and the world in which modern European nations live. This difference in scale is a thing which we must remember at every step. The Greek, in planting his settlements round the coasts of his own Mediterranean Sea, had nowhere to deal with races of men so utterly unlike his own as the races with whom modern Europeans have had to deal in planting their settlements in the islands and continents of the Ocean. Those among whom the Greek settled were mainly men of the same great family as himself, men capable of being raised, by a swifter or slower process, to his own level. His world did indeed take in, as ours does, nations of ancient and rival civilizations altogether distinct from his own, but it was not among those nations that he planted his colonies. Where the Egyptian had dwelled from an immemorial antiquity, where the Phœnician had planted his abiding colonies in the first dawn of European history, there the Greek in his best days never settled; Egypt did in the end become in some sort part of the Greek world; but it was not by settlement from free Greece, but by the conquests of the Macedonian kings. Egypt under the Ptolemies was like India now, a land conquered but not, strictly speaking, colonized, a land in which the older nation kept on its own older life alongside of the intruding life of the younger settlers. But it marks the narrow area of the old Greek world, that Egypt, in some sort its India, in some sort its China, came within the physical limits of that world; it was a land whose shores were washed by the same waters that washed the shores of Hellas. This difference of scale must never be forgotten while we are comparing or contrasting the days of old Greece with our days. But while we ever bear in mind the difference, we must ever beware of being led away by the misleading inferences which shallow talkers have often drawn from that difference. The nature of man is the same, whether he has a wider or a narrower sphere for his work; and the narrower sphere has some advantages over the wider. It is in small communities, in commonwealths of a single city, where men are brought closer together than in greater states, where every man has a personal share in the political life of the community, that the faculties of man are raised to the highest level and sharpened to the finest point. It is, from a political point of view, the great merit of modern scientific discoveries that they have enabled the people of a great community, of a kingdom or commonwealth covering a great space, to have that direct personal knowledge of the political life of the community of which they are members, that direct personal share in it, which once could not be had save where the state was confined to the territory of a single city. Instead of despising earlier times because they had not printing and railways and telegraphs, let us rather say that printing and railways and telegraphs were needed to raise large states to the level of small ones. By means of those inventions the Englishman of our day has become far more like an Athenian of the age of Periklês than his forefathers were in any earlier time. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the utmost the ordinary Englishman could do was now and then to give a vote, if he chanced to have one, at a parliamentary election, and to read or hear the most meagre accounts of what was going on in Parliament and elsewhere in public life. Very few Englishmen ever saw or heard Walpole or Pulteney, Pitt or Fox. Now the whole land has well-nigh become a single city; we see and hear our leading men almost daily; they walk before us as the leaders of the Athenian democracy walked before their fellow-citizens; they take us into their counsels; they appeal to us as their judges; we have in short a share in political life only less direct than the share of the Athenian freeman, a share which our forefathers, even two or three generations back, never dreamed of. But without the help of modern scientific discoveries, this active share in public affairs on the part of the mass of the inhabitants of a large country would have been simply a dream. Or look at a matter which more directly concerns the immediate subject of this discourse, look at the vast developement of English political life in the great English land beyond the Ocean; can any man believe that a hundred years back Maine, Florida, and California could have been kept together as a political whole by any power short of a despotism? Could those distant lands have acted as parts of one free political body, if they had had no means of intercourse with one another swifter than the speed of a horse? It is by the help of modern discoveries that the federal systems of old Greece can be reproduced on a gigantic scale, that a single Union of states can embrace a continent stretching from Ocean to Ocean instead of a peninsula stretching from sea to sea. In short, instead of despising those ancient communities which were the earliest form of European political life, we should rejoice that in many things we have gone back to the earliest form of European political life, that the discoveries of modern times have enabled the free states of old times to arise again, but to arise again, no longer on the scale of cities but on the scale of nations.
When then we compare the colonial system of modern times, like any other feature of modern political life, with the thing answering to it in the political life of the old Greek city-commonwealths, we must never forget the difference of area on which the political life of the two periods has been acted; but we must never allow ourselves to fancy that difference of area, any more than distance of time, wholly shuts us off from political fellowship with those earlier times or makes their experience of none effect for our political instruction. The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. The Greek settlements, like the Phœnician settlements before them, were settlements of cities, not of nations, not of kingdoms or of commonwealths on the scale of kingdoms. Till the political needs of a later age taught the Greek that several cities might be combined in a federal union, his whole political life had gathered round the single independent city as its essential unit. Every Greek city was not independent; but every Greek city deemed itself wronged if it was not independent; when its independence was lost, it was, within all Hellenic lands, lost by the rule of city over city. And the rule of city over city, if it took away the independence of the subject city as an equal power among other powers, did not wipe out its essential character as a separate city-commonwealth. The dependent city was not incorporated like an annexed land; it was not held in bondage like a subject province; it remained a city, with more or less of freedom in its local affairs, though bound, as against other powers, to follow the lead of the ruling city. The city was all in all; the smallness