Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/115

IV too closely on their traditional rights; and even then concerted action against it was not easy to organise. The mass of the people had very little knowledge of it, and accepted it, as they for the most part accept it still, without a hostile thought. Only in great capital cities, such as London or Paris, where the misdeeds of a monarch are obvious, and where discontent can easily gather and grow to a head, have violent anti-monarchical outbreaks found place in modern times. The inference seems to be a safe one that when a State is practically a city, and not a large territory, the traditional institution of kingship, with which political history seems everywhere to begin, is almost sure to be comparatively short-lived. The weakness or cruelty of a king, or a kingly family, would in a City-State be known and felt by all, and would be inevitably brought to an end, whether by sudden revolution or by gradual process. Thus the small size of the Greek State, which has been so often called in as an explanation of the phenomena of its history, or more truly indeed its peculiar nature as a City-State, is almost the only certain fact to which we can have recourse in order to account for this universal change from monarchy to aristocracy.

But there is another consideration which calls for attention before we go farther. It has already been said that monarchy was in one sense only a form of aristocracy; and the meaning of this dictum would seem to be that monarchy, though found everywhere in the world, does not everywhere of itself serve as an adequate political expression for