THE COMING OF DEMOCRACY 315 



families. But in towns, populated in great 

 measure by those who had cut themselves adrift 

 from home and tradition, respect for the aris- 

 tocracy could hardly survive. Men to whom 

 family connections were a matter of indifference, 

 could not be expected to understand that dis- 

 tinctions of family were in themselves sufficient 

 to support the authority of a senate. Between 

 aristocracy and democracy a struggle commenced, 

 in which the king assisted sometimes one side, 

 sometimes the other, and was gradually shorn of 

 his authority by both antagonists. 



The masses that now became a power in the 

 State generally represented a subject people that 

 had been conquered by the ancestors of the king 

 and the aristocracy. In southern Europe their 

 blood has been mainly that of a short-statured, 

 dark complexioned race l of keen sensibility and 

 high artistic talent which has been settled along 

 the northern shores of the Mediterranean since 

 the earliest days that the archaeologist's spade 

 has revealed to us. But in all probability they 

 also possessed some admixture of northern blood, 

 derived from waves of invasion which from time 

 immemorial had flowed over them. The ruling 

 classes which had established themselves in most 

 parts of Greece and in Upper Italy at the com- 

 mencement of classical history represented the 

 last of these invasions. The Dorians of Sparta, 

 and the patricians of Rome held in close subjec- 

 tion the helots and the plebeians; and early Roman 

 history is in great part occupied with the struggle 

 of the plebeians to secure social and political en- 

 franchisement. The characteristics of the French, 



1 Known in classical times as Pelasgian in Greece, as Ligurian 

 in Italy and the south of France, and as Iberian in Spain-, 



