Page:The Relation of the Sunday-school System to our Christian Patriotism.pdf/12

12 found a new nation. They carried with them the habits in which they had been educated, soon to be greatly modified by their changed circumstances; but they exerted no retroactive influence over the land they had left. The most powerful republics, subsequently, grew up within narrow limits. The Athenian territory was a triangular peninsula, having the mountains of Bœotia with the Euripus for its base, and its sides washed by the sea; but eighty miles long and of an average breadth not more than forty; yet, widely as the Athenian people extended their sway by conquest and colony, they held the government in the hands of their twenty-five thousand citizens, and tolerated no dictation from abroad. The same was true of Rome on the Tiber, when mistress of the world. She alone gave laws, but received none; and no representative from all her vast dominions ever had a vote in her senate or the assemblies of her people. The Helvetic Cantons became strong in their narrow sovereignties, leagued together for mutual support, but never spread their rule beyond their original limits. Holland, at one time the greatest commercial power of Europe, has never reached three millions of inhabitants on a densely populated soil; and though, at home, free beyond a parallel in the Old World, has ever been most despotic over its distant subjects. Great Britain, “on whose empire the sun never sets,” gives from her insular throne commands to every climate, but makes all her foreign territories suppliants for the slightest favour at the bar of her parliament. Not so with us. The citizen who goes forth from the midst of us to build his log-cabin on the farthest borders of the newest State, has a vote as influential as though he stood at the polls