Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/138

122 Subject. It is true they have by no means at all times reconciled these two opposite necessities equally well. But we never find amongst them those great single despotisms, destroying all individuality, and reducing man to a sort of abstract state and nameless function, as we see him in Egypt, Babylonia, China, and in Mussulman and Tartar despotisms. Take, one after another, the little municipal republics of Greece and Italy, the Germanic feudality, the grand centralized organizations of which Rome gave the first model, and of which the French Revolution reproduced the ideal, and you will always find a vigorous moral element, a strong sense of the public weal, and sacrifice to one general end. Individuality was but little secured in Sparta; the petty democracies of Athens, and of Italy in the middle ages, were nearly as ferocious as the most venal tyrant; the Roman Empire reached (partly, it is true, through the influence of the East) to an intolerable despotism; German feudality bordered upon