96 The Evolutlo7i of the State. 



pregnant centuries, the man's tone has been heard. It has 

 pushed its way through tumbling dynasties, midst the ruins 

 of baronial castles and the falling fortunes of kings and 

 emperors, impelled by the irresistible laws of evolution. 

 It has announced, with increasing force and fervor, one 

 inevitable condition of national and individual growth to 

 be the absolute, unqualified equality of individual human 

 rights. 



Much as this early recognition of the voice of the indi- 

 vidual man may have been smothered by the usurpations 

 of power during the succeeding centuries, it is a note- 

 worthy fact that, long before the discovery of this conti- 

 nent within which representative government is supposed to 

 have found its completest development, manhood, as the 

 essential unit of the State, was finding place in the 

 thoughts of the world's statesmen. 



Long after this, the English corporation (evolved, as has 

 been suggested, from the. Roman Collegia, out of which, in 

 time, as Professor Bryce, in his remarkable book on the 

 American Commonwealth, has shown, was to arise first the 

 Colonial government, then the State government, then the 

 Federal government, each in its turn an outgrowth of the 

 other) was to prefigure the growth as distinguished from 

 the drift of a State. Here, in the new land, with a diver- 

 sified climate and soil, untrammeled by questions of the 

 relations of ancient sovereignties, freed from the dominion 

 of the one man power, was to be formulated the first writ- 

 ten constitution known to man. And singularly enough, 

 it was to find its substantial prototype, not in the long line 

 of its immediate ancestry, but in the polity of ancient 

 Greece, where, long before the white-haired Goth had 

 invaded and subdued the swarthy Koman, the assembly of 

 the citizens determined important public questions, and 

 was the ultimate tribunal of the governed. And stranger 

 yet, it was to promulgate in solemn terms, in its new code, 

 the same paradox wliich had then existed in the streets of 

 Athens, proclaiming, with one breath, the equality of all 

 men before the law, and insisting, in the next, upon the 

 degradation and enslavement of a substantial minority of 

 mankind. 



And now, may we not see that the State has evolved by 

 the same processes and under the same conditions as those 

 by means of which civilization itself has grown? One 



