12 HISTORY OF GREECE. out, passing first into indifference, next, after experience of the despots, into determined antipathy. To an historian like Mr. Mitford, full of English ideas respect- ing government, this anti-monarchical feeling appears of the nature of insanity, and the Grecian communities like madmen without a keeper: while the greatest of all benefactors is the hereditary king, who conquers them from without, the seccnd- best is the home-despot, who seizes the acropolis and puts his fellow-citizens under coercion. There cannot be a more certain way of misinterpreting and distorting Grecian phenomena thai. to read them in this spirit, which reverses the maxims both of prudence and morality current in the ancient world. The hatred of kings as it stood among the Greeks, whatever may be thought about a similar feeling now, was a preeminent virtue, flowing directly from the noblest and wisest part of their nature : it was a consequence of their deep conviction of the necessity of univer- sal legal restraint it was a direct expression of that regulated sociality which required the control of individual passion from every one without exception, and most of all from him to whom power was confided. The conception which the Greeks formed of an unresponsible One, or of a king who could do no wrong, may be expressed in the pregnant words of Herodotus :' " He subverts the customs of the country : he violates women : h' puts men to death without trial." No other conception of the probable tendencies of kingship was justified either by a general knowledge of human nature, or by political experience as it stood from Solon downward : no other feeling than abhorrence could be entertained for the character so conceived : no other than a man of unprincipled ambition would ever seek to invest himself with it. Our larger political experience has taught us to modify this opinion by showing that, under the conditions of monarchy in the best governments of modern Europe, the enormities described by Herodotus do not take place, and that it is possible, by means of representative constitutions acting under a certain force of manners, customs, and historical recollection, to obviate many of 1 Herod, iii, 80. Nopuu re KIVEI irarpia, KOI 3mrai ywa/Ka{, s^mi-fi r
