Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/186

162 of Greece, and was forced to embark in a struggle which ended in her own downfall. Of the meaning of this jealousy and its fatal results, so far as it concerns the history of the City-State, I shall have a word to say later on; at present, leaving aside the question as to the precise steps by which complete democracy was realised under the leaders just mentioned, let us turn for a moment to consider what democracy really meant at Athens in the short period of its best days.

Just as the City-State differed as a species from the modern State, so did its democratic form differ from what we now understand by Democracy. For example, when we speak of our British constitution as having become a democracy, we mean that we are governed by a ministry which has at its back the majority of a democratically elected House of Commons. We are not governed by the people; this is impossible, even with the aid of representative institutions, in the large territories of the modern State. Some approach can be made to it, in the way of local government, which may enable the people in each district to understand and in some degree to manage their own local affairs; but great questions of national interest can only be presented to the people at periodical elections, and it constantly happens that on such questions the government of the day is actually for a year or two at variance with the feeling of the majority of the