continued with greater necessity when the brute creation was to be subdued, and fruits were to be obtained within the forest or from beneath the ground. The cave was cleared; the tree-hewn hut was raised; and the blessings of a life-time were abundant, if there were shelter and food for the children born and for the parents growing old in comparative degradation.1 As men multiplied and separated into tribes, the inequality existing among them from the beginning resulted in strife and victory and despotism. Physical energy was quite as predominant as it had been above other human powers; but the purposes to which it was directed were enlarged to the dominion of man over man, or of tribe over tribe. The labors of conquest ensued in all their terrors. Despotism over a race increased to despotism over an empire; and between empires there was the same succession of struggles that had occurred between men or tribes.2 But the period of conquerors was distinguished above the period of wanderers or husbandmen by the formation of more settled customs and more united homes. The very war and violence in which men engaged would bring 1 I have no desire to represent the early race as having been composed of savages; but it seems established by tradition, that, through a deluge or some general catastrophe, a period of ignorance and purely material energies succeeded to an earlier period we have no means to describe. See the excel- SHELLEY. new connections, new wants, new prospects, into being; and the future would begin to share the anxiety which the present had so far exclusively retained. It was an inclement season; but the order and the progress of mankind had found their seed-time. The air grew milder, and the earth was conscious of its trusts, at last. The old conflicts with nature for the first provisions of life were decided; but the later strifes of men had not yet begun to pass away. Still was the brow flushed, and still the arm was lifted, yet not alone for food or for dominion. New labors, the labors of civilization, filled up the lives of classes and of nations who would have scarcely maintained, much less have glorified, themselves through the earlier toils. Civilization, which was at first material, soon occupied the earth in its better forms. There were other longings in the human mind than any works of the hands alone could satisfy; and in the search for intellectual things, a wider world was opened than had yet been reached even in dreams. men in the freshness of her youth; and the lessons of her teaching led on to arts and sciences and nearly universal cultivation. The customs, scarcely attained to the strength of laws, were reformed and solemnly confirmed, and society wore a new aspect. Former employments were abandoned; former manners were improved; a thousand resources of sustenance and wealth and luxury replaced the scanty measure of former times; and the world was beautified at the same time that it was expanded. But with all these Poetry came to live with changes, the fierceness of despotism, war, and superstition continued to waste the earth "as an open sepulchre," beyond which no purity, no peace, no liberation, had been anew revealed. Even the deities in whom men believed were at variance with one another; and the religions, of which they formed the crown, were efficacious against the good rather than against the evil in the world. This rapid account of the three great labors of mankind in the legendary and the historical eras of antiquity will be, it is hoped, sufficiently clear to explain the natural principles of growth which ancient liberty obeyed. Each successive period was marked, not only by the undertaking of larger enterprises, but by the development of increased powers; both which imply, without the need of explanation, that the freedom of each successive race must have surpassed, in some degree, the freedom of its predecessors. The attempt will by and by be made to describe more particularly the part which liberty sustained in the advancement of the ancient nations; but for the present, it must be our aim to define as accurately as possible the limits within which this great principle of human progress would be itself restricted, before the coming of a Saviour through whom it first appeared that the growth of liberty alone was not the growth of thorough truth. 3 The idea of liberty is inseparable from the idea of power. Liberty, in fact, is the means of exercising power; while the possession of power is worth 3 See Chapter VIII. nothing without its employment in liberty. The ability is nearly synonymous with the freedom to do any thing which is the natural work of human hands or human minds. An individual An individual may, indeed, be free, but to no good purpose, without capacity and cultivation; nor will a nation, though free, make any use of its liberty, unless it have strength and civilization. On the other hand, neither an individual nor a people can be accounted powerful, unless both have the freedom in which their powers are subject to no unnecessary control. Now there are different degrees of power, as of liberty. One is physical, implying muscular and rugged force which can be turned to use only in a violent and barbarous freedom. It may be power over nature or over man; but wherever it exists by itself, it is always the growth of an early period and the possession of an uncivilized race. The second degree is intellectual, and is joined to a wiser freedom and a larger civilization. It must be physical as well as intellectual, in order to be firm and useful; but its firmness and its usefulness arise from the sources of industry and knowledge and law. Far above both is moral power, more gentle and more peaceful, yet a thousand fold more mighty and more beneficent. With one man or with a whole nation, this power, if it be free, is sure to be employed in the justest and purest liberty, because it is the worker of all purity and justice. As physical power issues from the appetites and the vigor of the body, and as intellectual power springs from the desires and the ability of the mind, so moral power has its origin in the affections and the holiness of the soul. ""T is liberty of heart derived from Heaven, Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind, To walk with God, to be divinely free."4 The purpose of starting with these definitions of liberty, in connection with the power to which mankind is capable of attaining, will be more apparent as we come to comprehend the measure and the character of ancient freedom, through the measure and the character of the faculties whose exercise and development it supplied. But there are other subdivisions of liberty which are more commonly regarded as corresponding with the various periods of history, because they are in more immediate relation with the laws on which all liberty depends. The idea of law is twofold, inasmuch as it always suggests both constraint and security. According to the predominance of one effect over the other in any body of laws, it may be generally said that they establish a greater or a less amount of liberty. If a code, for instance, be devised by man to restrain a people from the possession or the employment of the rights we suppose to be given them by God, they are virtually a people of bondmen. On the contrary, wherever human institutions are framed in order to preserve the rights and the hopes of Divine bestowal, there liberty exists in all the completeness to which it can aspire. It may be observed, parenthetically, that |