26 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
on the other hand, the people of England govern them- 
selves as effectively as the people of the United States, 
and the differences are superficial and the resemblances 
are fundamental. Yet, as a rule, people cannot free 
themselves from the trammels of names, and any com- 
munity of ignorant half-breed Indians ruled by an 
irresponsible despot is thought worthy of our special 
sympathy if that despot happens to be labelled presi- 
dent rather than king. 
A flagrant instance of reasoning from loose analogies 
was furnished about a century ago by an English 
member of Parliament, William Mitford, who wrote a 
history of Greece under the influence of his over- 
mastering dread of parliamentary reform. His first 
volume appeared in 1784, when the reformers seemed 
on the eve of the victory which they did not really 
win till 1832. Mitford wished to show that democracy 
is always and everywhere an unmitigated evil, and he 
used the history of Athens to point his moral, although 
Athenian democracy was not really like anything in 
the modern world. A more curious distortion of facts 
than Mitford’s “ History of Greece” has seldom been 
put into print. 
When Grote, half a century later, wrote his magnifi- 
cent “ History of Greece,” he appeared as the champion 
of Athens. He, too, was a member of Parliament, an 
advanced free-thinker and democrat. It was as natu- 
ral for him to love the Athenians as for Mitford to 
hate them, and possibly his sympathies may once or 
twice have urged him a little too far. But his mental 
powers and his scholarship were immeasurably greater 
than Mitford’s, and he did not try to force a lesson 
from his facts; he tried to understand the people 
