Literary and Historical Miscellanies Author:George Bancroft General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1857 Original Publisher: Harper Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select f... more »rom more than a million books for free. Excerpt: STUDIES IN HISTORY. ECONOMY OF ATHENS. Time can never efface the interest of mankind in the nation which set the example of intrusting supreme power to the people. The democracy of Athens, with all the imperfections in every part of its public service, with the abuses attending its finances, and the corruption which finally turned the elective franchise into a source of personal revenue, maintains its dignity in the eyes of the world; for there the elements of civil liberty were first called into action. We are not the blind admirers of the Athenian commonwealth. No tongue can adequately praise many of the results of that State; and it would also be difficult fitly to display the deficiencies in its organization, and the gross injustice of its foreign policy. Our own confederacy does not more surpass the Grecian in the extent of territory over which itsliberties are diffused, than in the excellence of the details of its laws. It is the genius of our institutions to leave every thing to find its natural level, to throw no obstacles in the way of the free progress of honest industry, to melt all the old castes of society into one mass, to extend the rights of equal citizenship with perfect liberality, and to prevent every thing like a privileged order in the State. The Athenian commonwealth was, on the contrary, eminently artificial in its character; it conceded with a chary hand the advantages of citizenship to the strangers resident on its soil. The elective franchise was, mainly, an inherited dignity; the government was a species of multitudinous aristocracy, where the le...« less