Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/214

 not a great and widely extended empire as in Asia, hut a number of small neighbouring states. It was impossible for them to avoid engaging in war with those Savages who made inroads upon their borders and disturbed their undertakings; those who could not be expelled would be forced into servitude, and thus Slavery in this region may have arisen.

The free subjects of these new States were, even from the commencement, treated with kindness, and afterwards carefully instructed and trained; not, as in Asia, under the government of a dominant race, but for the most part under that of a single foreign family, whose lives were at all times open to the inspection of their subjects:—these subjects would doubtless not be blindly satisfied with all the demands and arrangements of their Rulers, but would examine for themselves how these tended to the general welfare; and therefore the Ruler would be under the necessity of maintaining towards them a circumspect and upright course of conduct. And out of these circumstances there arose, for the first time, that keen sense of Right, which in our opinion is the true characteristic of the European nations, in contrast with the religious submissiveness to authority which is peculiar to the Asiatics.

These governing families at length lost their authority over the remoter public undertakings, or they died out, or were banished; and thus, since the ideas of Right were already pretty generally diffused, Republics naturally arose in place of the previous petty Monarchies. We have nothing here to do with the form of Government, or the Political Freedom of these States. In the popular political belief of the Greeks, the essential was confounded with the accidental, and the end with the means; King and Tyrant were synonymous words, and the memory of their ancient ruling families was only regarded with terror:—a confusion which has even come down to