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E. WALTER MAUNDER, F.R.A.S., ON 



that Greek liberty was worth sacrificing existence for, even her 

 own existence as a city and state. 



The fact that Athens stood alone in her appreciation of the 

 meaning of the struggle, and in her readiness to sacrifice every- 

 thing shows that, had she been overcome, there was no moral 

 force elsewhere in Greece sufficient to have carried on the 

 struggle. Greece would have ceased to be. 



The Value of Small States. 

 And what would the world have lost ? 



We should have lost the results of that free play of human 

 individuality and genius which grew out of the freedom of 

 Athens, and of the other cities of Greece. In drama, Athens 

 gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides ; in history, Thucy- 

 dides ; in philosophy, Plato. In Athens the fine arts, and 

 especially sculpture, reached their highest development. In 

 Athens was trained Aristotle, the father of the sciences. Not 

 all the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Macedon 

 have contributed so much to intellectual progress as this one 

 little Greek state, not so large as the county of Surrey. 



We have been told of late by Treitzschke. the historian- 

 prophet of Germany, that the small state, by reason of its 

 smallness, must necessarily be petty, confined, unambitious in 

 its thoughts and life. Great events, enacted upon a broad 

 stage, are necessary, in his belief, to raise men's thoughts and 

 actions to the heroic scale. The instance of Athens, if it stood 

 alone, would be sufficient to refute the argument. But Athens, 

 though the most brilliant, was but the exemplar of many 

 Greek city states, and the phenomenon of Athens was closely 

 reproduced 1,500 years later in the achievements of Florence 

 and other great Italian cities. All these shone in the very 

 particulars of heroic and martial patriotism, of civic pride and 

 political sagacity, which Treitzschke would claim as the 

 monopoly of vast empires. The same virtues were also shown 

 in pre-eminent degree by the free cities of the Netherlands, and 

 another little state, one of the smallest of all, the inland city of 

 Geneva, has had an influence on religious and political thought 

 that has been world wide. 



The principle of sovereignty has again and again sought to 

 establish itself in world power, and it has as often failed, and 

 failed because the military strength upon which it had relied to 

 establish and maintain its dominance, lias ebbed away, and because 

 of the righteous hatred which its tyranny has always evoked. 



