Modern history at no period presents to us such a vast system of republican states as we meet with in the annals of antiquity, which exhibit this under the most various forms, as the predominant constitution of the whole civilized world, not only in its infant, but in its maturest and most flourishing development. Not only the Grecian communities, Carthage, Rome, and the Italian municipalities, but also all the independent nations of central and northern Europe, possessed a more or less perfect form of republican polity. This portion, therefore, of ancient history furnishes to political science a phenomenon which in the highest degree demands its attention. However greatly its freedom of inquiry and high intellectual culture, its splendid examples of patriotism and its noble characters and heroic deeds, may prepossess us in its favor, on the whole we are forced to confess that experience has decided against such a system. This great teacher shows it to us as utterly impracticable, and ill adapted to promote the real progress of human development, inasmuch as with whatever of brightest promise it may begin, it invariably terminates in barbarism and disorder. In all of these states we trace early enough the same evil tendency to political license and anarchy, which, developing itself with ceaseless rapidity, soon paves the way to the indeterminate condition of absolute power. Almost all the great thinkers and political writers of antiquity, without exception, set themselves to oppose the democratic element of their national constitutions, and foresaw and predicted the ruin of their country from this source, without being able in any way to prevent it. It will be enough to mention Plato in Athens, and in a different manner and degree, Cicero in Rome, who was himself drawn into the vortex of political strife. The remedy and counterpoise for the evils of this democratical spirit was sought by the political thinkers and philosophers of those times, in a doubtlessly noble but still very imperfect form of an aristocracy--a remedy which is as little consonant to our feelings as it is unlikely to satisfy our scientific convictions. A just and clear idea of an hereditary and well-regulated monarchy was at that date almost entirely unknown, since in its essential features, in its true and perfect character, it is entirely of a Christian origin. In the ancient world, at most, a few and faint outlines of it are occasionally to be discovered.