Athenian Development.
Athens and Switzerland are popular synonyms for democracy. Yet Switzerland has only become truly democratic within the past century, and Athens never was truly so. This has been alluded to in a preceding article. What did happen in Athens was a wonderful growth from aristocratic exclusiveness toward democracy. The gains that were made brought about finally a state of things that was never approached elsewhere in the ancient world save possibly in the Hebrew commonwealth. For this advance all honor is due the men of Athens. A comparative study of the earlier constitution with the successive reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes may well be used to point out that the common people were more and more coming into their own. West, on p. 125 of his “Ancient World,” has a table of some of these constitutions which might well be completed as a blackboard exercise. It will then at once become apparent what direction reform was taking. Note, however, the weakness of the executive and the reason for it, i. e., the Greek jealousy of individual or continued power. Show how the tyranny of Peisistratos was almost the inevitable result of this weakness of the executive. The exclusion of foreign (even Greek) settlers from citizenship, save in exceptional cases, was entirely contrary to our ideas. And the existence of slavery in the person of captives in war and of poor debtors was a fatal blot on the democracy and the welfare of Athens, as of all the Greek States. The social struggle, with its various mitigations of the lot of the very poor parallels the political strife. Our children are breathing in from the papers and from current discussions the idea that our social inequalities and our contest between capital and labor are a new phenomenon. They ought to learn that such contest is almost world old. We have new elements such as the vast individual fortune and the part taken by the corporations, both unknown in old Greece, but the essential features of the struggle were the same. And the tendency of twenty-four hundred years ago as well as of to-day was and is to give larger right and opportunity to the common man.