Their imagination was perpetually called forth--their deliberative reason rarely;--they were the fitting audience for an orator, whose art is effective in proportion to the impulse and the passion of those he addresses.

Nor must it be forgotten that the representative system, which is the proper conductor of the democratic action, if not wholly unknown to the Greeks [160], and if unconsciously practised in the Spartan ephoralty, was at least never existent in the more democratic states.
And assemblies of the whole people are compatible only with those small nations of which the city is the country.

Thus, it would be impossible for us to propose the abstract constitution of any ancient state as a warning or an example to modern countries which possess territories large in extent--which subsist without a slave population -- which substitute representative councils for popular assemblies--and which direct the intellectual tastes and political habits of a people, not by oratory and conversation, but through the more calm and dispassionate medium of the press.

This principle settled, it may perhaps be generally conceded, that on comparing the democracies of Greece with all other contemporary forms of government, we find them the most favourable to mental cultivation--not more exposed than others to internal revolutions--usually, in fact, more durable,--more mild and civilized in their laws--and that the worst tyranny of the Demus, whether at home or abroad, never equalled that of an oligarchy or a single ruler.

That in which the ancient republics are properly models to us, consists not in the form, but the spirit of their legislation.