This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI THE REALISATION OF DEMOCRACY: ATHENS I SAID at the end of the last chapter that Athena alone, of all the City-States of antiquityJ solved for a time the problem of freely developing the talent of the individual, while maintaining fully that identification of the individual with the State which was the very essence of Greek social life, j This proposition I wish to prove and explain in the present chapter. By keeping steadily to it, we shall obtain, I believe, the best idea of such "good life " as it was possible for the City-State to realise; and we shall learn 'to identify that "good life " with the form and spirit of Democracy, the last phase taken by this kind of social union in the course of its natural development, before decay set in. I say the form and spirit of Democracy; for though Democracy is often treated as a form of government only,1 we surely may not be content so to treat it, if we are really bent on understanding what the TToTu? in its perfection could do for the education of mankind. 1 E.g. by Sir H. Maine in Popular Government, oh. i. [Let us start by taking as a text some memorable words of the statesman who above all other Athenians, in the golden days of Athens, perceived what the State might do for the individual, and the individual for the State, towards the realisation of "the good life." When Athens at last became involved in war with Sparta, at the funeral of the DEGREES first victims of battle Pericles was chosen to deliver 'V an oration over them, of which Thucydides the historian, himself doubtless among the audience, has preserved for us the spirit and the thoughts in his own weighty and subtle phraseology. One passage in this immortal speech seems to embody in living words the statesman's idea of...