What we regard as civic freedom seems confined to Europe, ancient and modern, and to our excessively modern America, though in our own generation the contagion appears to have spread to Asia. The past history of the vast peoples of China and India illustrates different principles. China has hitherto adhered to the Confucian scheme. A civic order prescribed and administered authoritatively from above has been the ideal for society and government. Political freedom as conceived in Europe has not been heard of. The individual has pursued his progress within this frame of political order, or disorder, regarding which he has had little voice. Within this socially bounden life, as it seems to us, the people, through their devout approval and earnest observance, have fostered the Chinese virtues of filial piety and of conformity to revered rites and ceremonies, and have made them into a willingly followed ideal. Within this fixed social scheme individuals have developed tastes and faculties for poetry and painting and for the crafts which adorn dwellings and temples.

Perhaps the Confucian scheme itself, as we may note hereafter, was China's chief contribution to the store of human achievement. Quite otherwise the great Indian contributions came from the sublimated thinking of men whose aims were detached from the frame and energizing of society. What cared they for any civic freedom! The liberty to direct their own lives freely amid the

affairs of society was but part of the dire net of life from which, through the exercise of a profounder spiritual freedom, they sought deliverance-as likewise we shall note.

II

THE EXAMPLE OF THE GREEK CITY-STATE

If Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile fed men just for the turning of the soil, and if the heat and tumult of growth in India might move the contemplative mind to loathe the transitory, Greece, with her Asiatic coast, her islands and the penetrating sea, made an apt home for quick faculty and varied human trait. It was a land of harbours, surrounded and illumined by the sea; a land to reward toil and yet not pamper; a land of mountains and lovely valleys, with a variety of natural growths and yielding under cultivation grains and many kinds of fruits. By reason of isthmuses and mountain barricades small peoples could protect themselves. No part of Greece was naturally fitted to dominate the whole. The land favoured local independence, and might foster individual freedom in the members of that gifted race which were to make it their home.

A gifted race indeed! That first clear testimony, the Homeric epics,1 proves the Greeks gifted beyond

1 The remains of the Cretan or Mycenaean civilization show the Greek race on the way to become itself distinctively.

other men, and shows them vibrant with the impulses and faculties of personal and civic freedom. The heroes are wonderfully and most novelly free.

The assembly of chiefs and people in the second book of the Iliad is perhaps our earliest record of the call and conduct of such a temperamental deliberative gathering. Having told his plan to a council of the chiefs, Agamemnon directs the heralds to call the host to an assembly. There he speaks with silly guile, proposing an abandonment of the hopeless war. As a natural though apparently unanticipated result, the people rise and rush for the ships. Odysseus is moved to stay their flight and press them to sit down again. Bandy-legged Thersites rises and reviles Agamemnon, and urges the host to return home and leave him to gather spoil and honours by himself-he who has dishonoured Achilles, a better man than himself. With this real grievance of the outrage put upon the best of the Greeks, Thersites insinuates his own valiant part in the war. Odysseus browbeats the demagogue and strikes him with his staff, and he sits down amid the rather tempered laughter of the rest. Then Odysseus, addressing Agamemnon, urges on the war; Nestor backs him, and Agamemnon, closing the harangues, gives orders for battle, with threats of death to those who skulk by the ships. The Argives shout aloud.

Doubtless the whole procedure is "heroic," and the host is expected to listen, not to argue. Never

theless the call and meeting of the assembly, its changing mood and final tumultuous acceptance of the leaders' decision, assume some freedom of debate, though it behooves the speaker to be a man of worth.

The fall of Troy, Achilles' death, Odysseus' return, all were fated, with great propriety in accordance with inherent tendency or probability. But within this large web of fate, what freedom of whim and mood and action!-although death is fated for us all, yet while he lives man may be free. The Homeric thought of fate was a just judgement upon human life-free within the qualities of its nature and the bounds of its mortality.

Such conceptions of freedom within bounds recognize the law of consequences, that when the doer has done a wicked fatal act, the act and its entailments become as fate to the doer, who must expiate. So in Aeschylus and Sophocles Fate becomes ethical; but the doer in his initial act is free.

As the Greeks balanced fate and freedom, so in their judgement of human lots, of human happiness and misfortune, their judgement did not wince. Their natures were eager, their desires intense; fulfilment brought joy. Yet human fortunes were overshadowed by mortality, and often overthrown at the outset or in mid-course. There was ill in every life, and in some lives some good. So they judged fairly, not cursing or rejecting life nor thoughtlessly Utopian.

Thoughtfulness in conduct, the habit of thinking before acting, was a trait ascribed by Pericles to his Athenians, and he might have included other Greeks. But thoughtfulness in conduct is of the essence of freedom, or may be, when the man is not over - thoughtful and despondent. Greeks loved action as well as consideration.

In the routine of life which human beings lead or are pushed along by needs and instincts, gaining livelihood or wealth, and caring for wives and children, Greeks were as free as might be—that is, partially free in their ingenuity and device of means, though the motive was a natural need. It was in the use of wealth when gained, and of the leisure which it brought, that the Greeks reached more complete freedom. Here came freedom in the choice of life and the thought of its object.

We may still take the Athenians as our best example, since they seem as the crown of all the Greeks, and also have told us more about themselves. Greek civilization, and, above all, the Athenian, strikes us as urban, presenting examples of a completely corporate urban society; for Greek society was closely inter-knit and corporate. But it was based on farming, and for the most part on the hard, precarious farming of small farm-owners. Agriculture is a form of labour never sneered at through all Greek literature.

The farmer worked to provide for his household. He did not expect wealth. He was a poor man