and file of the voters are led around by the nose here, just as they are in every other so-called 'self-governing' country in the world."

"I would not for a moment attempt to deny that there is a good deal of truth in what you say," I responded, "but I think that perhaps you have overlooked one or two important distinctions. Swiss political leaders, or 'bosses' as you call them, have gained their ascendancy, as have Roosevelt, Bryan, LaFollette and Folk, principally by the ability and desire they have shown to serve the people, and only secondarily by their efficiency in building up trong political organizations. Nearly all the political leaders of all political parties in Switzerland are of this type. The Croker, Platt type which robs or betrays the people in order to enrich itself and its friends, does not exist within the confines of Switzerland. This difference you will see is absolutely fundamental."

"But let me make myself plain on another point," I continued. "I do not harbor the delusion that Switzerland is a paradise. It is true that the Swiss have less grinding poverty and less vice per capita than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of New Zealand, and yet one finds numbers of poor people, lazy people and dishonest people, as well as much drunkenness in Switzerland. While it is evident that the Swiss have disposed of many problems which at present are perplexing the rest of the world, it is equally evident that they have many serious problems still confronting them. Will they be able to solve these problems? I do not know. Will they continue to progress in the future as they have in the past? I hope so, but even more do I hope that the United States and the rest of the world will be able to put to practical use the splendid discoveries which the Swiss

already have made in the realm of statecraft."

66

Curious, is n't it?" mused my compatriot between puffs at his pipe, "the Swiss are the only people in the world with a capital larger than their indebtedness-and yet," he exclaimed, suddenly rising and speaking with great earnestness, "what does that amount to? Their· greatest capital is in the civic sagacity, civic energy and civic purity of their citizens. Most of their voters have made politics their business, and statesmanlike politics has made of every legitimate business a success. I am very much tempted, when I get home, to go in for politics myself."

"Switzerland has perhaps more numerous government activities," he continued, and yet less paternalism' than any country in the world. I could not understand this for a long time, but that was because I had not yet achieved the national point of view. According to that the people, by means of the Initiative and Referendum, are the government and consequently, whatever it does for them is self-help and not 'paternalism.' Switzerland has worked out not only a successful political democracy but also to a certain extent, a successful industrial democracy. It has no corporation-owned 'bosses,' no Napoleons of finance, no oil kings, no robber coal barons."

I was so astonished I could only grasp his hand.

"If the American people," he continued, "could see what I have seen this summer-political and industrial democracy in practice, they could not fail to realize that our present era of corporation regulation by executive denunciation is of interest chiefly as the precursor of a more rational future régime of gradually and conservatively worked out social reconstruction." CARL S. VROOMAN.

Cotuit, Massachusetts.

solidarity were the key-notes of Roman greatness, while the queen of Attica, the favorite city of Olympus and the special charge of the Goddess of Wisdom, became the greatest treasure-house of philosophic thought and the age-long teacher of art. Athens was above all else a diffuser of light on the mental and artistic planes, She was a great conservator of intellectual freedom and a developer of the artistic or the beautiful. Proudly she stands among the intellectual capitals of the world. Who can measure the debt succeeding ages owe to her?

As civilizations have their immortal capitals, they have also capital periods, summer seasons of fruition, golden days, when, in the compass of a few generations, the wealth of ages blossoms forth, crowning the favored period with fadeless splendor and making it a storehouse of wealth for men and nations throughout all future time. It is of Athens during her golden day that we now write. The divisions of time such as mark days, weeks, months and years, are arbitrary and artificial. It is impossible to say that on such a day or in such a year a nation awakened from lethargy, or in such a decade the light of a new day flooded a land; yet for convenience historians frequently set arbitrary dates as starting points or boundary lines, when considering great periods. Thus, for example, most historians date Modern Times from the fall of Constantinople, in 1453. The dawn of the Renaissance had flamed the sky before that date, yet it was some time later before the full splendor of the new day burst on Europe, giving to Italy the golden age of art; to the Europe north of the Alps the New Learning and the Reformation; and to Western Europe the quickening of the searching spirit that drove Columbus across the ocean in the teeth of the sneers of the world, so happily described by Lowell in these lines: "Whatever can be known of earth we know,'

Sneered Europe's wise men, in their snail-shells curled;

No! said one man in Genoa, and that No

Out of the dark created this New World."

And this searching spirit during this same period also led Vasco da Gama to double the Cape and open an ocean highway to the treasure-house of India, while it drove the ships of Magellan around the globe.

So when we come to notice the golden age of Athens, we cannot say with accuracy that in such a year or decade the new day dawned. But for purposes of convenience and because it most nearly covers the golden day of Athens, we will take the one hundred years immediately following the battle of Salamis, 480 B. C., for that century is marked by the most wonderful sunburst of intellectual and artistic splendor known to the history of any nation of earth during a like period.

The battle of Salamis destroyed forever Persia's long-cherished dream of European conquest. Ten years earlier, in 490 B. C., the fate of Athens had hung in the balance at Marathon, where more than fifty thousand Persian warriors from many fields of triumph faced ten thousand citizen soldiers of Greece-the forlorn hope of Athens. The Persians were disciplined warriors, trained to obey and accustomed to victory. The Greeks were lovers of art, culture, trade and peaceful pursuits, but they were free men, made desperate by the deadly peril that confronted hearth, home and fatherland; and though they were less than one man to five of the enemy, such was their heroism and dauntless courage that they swept to death or from the soil of Greece the legions of Darius.

Ten years later the hosts of Xerxes moved irresistibly over the plains of Greece. The heroism of Leonidas and his Spartan band thrilled with pride the Hellenic heart but could not save the land from the destructive onrush of the barbarian hordes. Under the wise guidance of Themistocles the Athenians induced to desert their city and take refuge on their vessels, and though the City of the Violet Crown was destroyed and her temples burned, the people unscathed rode the waves of the blue

Ægean. Nothing remained for Xerxes but to attempt their destruction on the sea, and this promised to be an easy task, for the Persian armada contained more than six hundred vessels, over two hundred more than the Grecian fleet. Through the genius of Themistocles, however, the enemy was lured into a trap in Salamis Bay, and at a chosen moment, with a ringing battle-cry that meant victory or death and which was a thrilling appeal to every loyal child of Athens, the Greeks hastened into the fray. Eschylus, in his great poem, "The Persians," thus described the battle-cry of the Athenians:

“And when day, bright to look on with white steeds,
O'erspread the earth, then rose from the Hellenes
Loud chant of cry of battle, and forthwith
Echo gave answer from each island rock.

"O sons of Hellenes, forward, free your country;
Free, too, your wives, your children, and the shrines
Built to your fathers' Gods, and holy tombs
Your ancestors now rest in. Now the fight
Is for our all.""

Xerxes from a throne on a high hill overlooking the sea gazed on the battle. He expected to witness the entire demolition of the Greek fleet. Instead, to his amazement, rage and despair, he beheld one by one his own vessels sink to rise no more. The triumph of the Grecian fleet was complete.

Salamis was far more than one of the most decisive battles in the history of civilization. It was destiny-determining in its issue. Had Xerxes won, the heel of Oriental despotism would have crushed the free, aspiring soul of Grecian civilization, and Europe would have been orientalized.

This great period of stress and strain, when the life of Greece trembled in the balance, when on at least two occasions it seemed as though only Divine interposition could possibly save the Hellenes from subjugation, stirred the profoundest depths of life in this wonderful people. From Salamis, extending forward through a century of time, we find ourselves in the midst of one of those great summer days

in civilization's history during which is reaped a bounteous harvest for all future ages. This period was marked by combined intellectual and artistic greatness unknown to the history of any other people in a like period. Here poetry and dramatic art were only surpassed by sculpture the greatest the world has ever known. Here history and statescraft went hand in hand; while ethical idealism and metaphysical philosophy, companioned by reason and imagination, ascended the Himalyas of human aspiration and desire.

To appreciate this period it is only necessary to call to mind a few of the great men whose work rises out of the historic past as lofty mountain peaks which look down on far-stretching plains below. Among the valiant Athenians who bravely battled at Salamis was Eschylus, the first of the great dramatic poets of Greece. Ten years before, at the call of the fatherland, he had joined the Grecian forces at Marathon, where he distinguished himself for dauntless courage.

Though the great dramatist always regarded his efforts at the two great crucial battles in Grecian history as the most worthy achievements of his life, civilization remembers him chiefly because of his immortal contributions to the permanent literature of the world. He was one of the greatest tragic poets of all time. His creations are the work of a genius of the first order, characterized by profound philosophical insight, nobility of thought and colossal imagination.

"Justice," declared this master dramatist of the ancient world, "shines in smoke-grimed houses and holds in regard the life of the righteous; she leaves with averted eyes the gold-bespangled palace which is unclean and goes to the abode that is holy."

Hugo terms this master poet "the ancient Shakespeare." In characterizing him he says:

Following Eschylus comes Sophocles, another immortal whose thought was destined to enrich all future ages. Sophocles lacked the sweep of imagination, the originality and strength of the elder tragedian, but his work was far more finished, beautiful and artistic than that of Eschylus.

Third in the trio of great tragic poets comes Euripides. His plays lack something of the colossal imagination of Eschylus and the polish or artistic perfection of Sophocles, but they were the most humanistic of the great dramatic creations of Greece. Euripides was a man of many tastes and accomplishments. He was at once an athlete and a painter; a student of all philosophies extant and a poet whose rich imaginative power was companioned by a profound sympathy for earth's unfortunates. Of this master tragedian it has been well said:

"No ancient writer seems so modern as Euripides; none knew human nature so well or sympathized so deeply with itespecially with women and slaves, with the unfortunate and the lowly." At a At a time when the Greek looked down in an arrogant contempt on the unfortunate slaves, Euripides wrote:

""T is but a single thing that brands the slave with shame his name; in all else no upright slave is a whit worse than free-born men."

This poet, though a deeply religious man, refused to condone the sins and immoralities of the gods. He was far more enlightened than many modern Christian rulers. Thus, he declared that the trouble that led to the Trojan war should have been settled by arbitration. Sometimes his moralizing reminds us of Shakespeare. "Heaven's justice may tarry awhile," he declares, “yet comes it at the last in no wise weakened."

These three great tragic poets whose works alone would have rendered the century of which we write forever memorable, each reflected in a large way the dominance of three passages expressed in the life of Athens.

"Eschylus," well observes Professor Botsford, "had represented the struggle of Athens for the preservation of freedom and for the acquisition of empire; Sophocles had embodied the spirit of Athens at ease, enjoying the fruit of her labor; but Euripides was the poet of her political collapse, of that period in which the great city in an agony of soul was casting off her ambition or worldly conquest to emerge more beautiful and more spiritual than she had been before."

In this period the annals of nations and civilizations began to engross the attention of the educated. Herodotus, often termed the "Father of History," having been exiled from his native city wandered far and wide studying the various peoples, their habits of life, individual aspirations and national dreams and aims. Wherever he went he industriously gathered all available facts relating to the past of the people with whom he was sojourning. These tales necessarily contained an admixture of fact and legend, for civilization at that stage was credulous rather than critical, and in man's groping for reasons to account for various phenomena he naturally resorted to myth and popular superstition; and the stories