The only remedy lay either in some kind of permanent
federation, combined with representative government; or else in what we
might call "incorporation and assimilation," after the Roman fashion.
But the incorporation of one town with another, though effected with
brilliant results in the early history of Attika, involved such a
disturbance of all the associations which in the Greek mind clustered
about the conception of a city that it was quite impracticable on any
large or general scale. Schemes of federal union were put into
operation, though too late to be of avail against the assaults of
Macedonia and Rome. But as for the principle of representation, that
seems to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind; no statesman of
antiquity, either in Greece or at Rome, seems to have conceived the idea
of a city sending delegates armed with plenary powers to represent its
interests in a general legislative assembly. To the Greek statesmen, no
doubt, this too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity of the
sovereign city.
This feeling with which the ancient Greek statesmen, and to some extent
the Romans also, regarded the city, has become almost incomprehensible
to the modern mind, so far removed are we from the political
circumstances which made such a feeling possible. Teutonic
civilization, indeed, has never passed through a stage in which the
foremost position has been held by civic communities.
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