"What of our public justice and political freedom?" some have objected. Yet even here we have no cause to disparage the Greek. He would have denied our claim to political freedom as he understood it, and pointed to our "wire-pullers," our "bosses," and above all our party system, in which the freedom of individual political expression disappears.

With regard to public justice there were undoubtedly faults in the Athenian system, but the revelations of corruption that we have recently seen may bid us pause.

Moreover, how very recently is it that our justice has advanced beyond a semi-savage state! I have myself spoken to a man who had seen a woman hanged in England for stealing a coat from a stall. I came across another case of a boy of 12 hanged for horse stealing. Within living memory a child of 9 years old was condemned to death for stealing two penny worth of paint. The sentence was commuted, but the astonishing thing was that such a sentence could be passed. It was not till 1861 that capital punishment was abolished save for the offences for which it is still inflicted.

Germany broke human victims on the wheel as late as the 19th Century. The brutal treatment in some of the American prisons and

reformatories to-day is almost incredible, and the flagrant iniquity of Lynch law would have been absolutely incredible to the Greek mind.

"How about slavery?" some have urged, as though that entirely disposed of any claims. that the Athenian might have in other directions.

But as a matter of fact, although one would not uphold Athenian slavery for a moment, it must be remembered that Athenian slavery was not by any means what we understand by slavery.

When we think of slavery we are thinking of our slavery or Roman slavery, which is a very different kind of thing. Our slavery was an altogether abominable institution, for which very little can be said.

The Athenian slave, on the whole, was undoubtedly well treated. The domestic slave was admitted by a religious ceremony to membership of the family, and his status was practically that of the child whom the parent can punish and whose occupation is at the parents' bidding. He was duly looked after and, in the event of sickness, was tended in person by the mistress of the household.

The slave was carefully protected in the Athenian courts of law, and if he was ill

treated his master was compelled by public opinion to part with him. The slaves in the mines seem to have been the only ones whose lot in itself, apart from the lack of freedom, was a hard one, and even their condition would not compare with that of our sweated industries in the slums of our great cities.

The Greek slave could own property and frequently bought his freedom, and apparently might even, at any rate in theory, be wealthier than his master. It is necessary for us to dismiss from our minds the fancy pictures of the pernicious little text books which would lead us to suppose that the Athenians lived a life of leisured ease upon the labour of the slaves. On the one hand, the free Athenian citizens were engaged in every kind of occupation from the highest to the lowest, and a large proportion of them certainly possessed no slaves at all. A man in the economic position of Sokrates would be very unlikely to own a slave. On the other hand the slaves were by no means engaged entirely in menial occupations. It would appear that the heads of most of the large business houses of Athens were slaves. Pasion, the greatest banker of Greece, was a slave and a bank manager for the major part of his life. The police, who arrested the free

Athenian citizens, were slaves, and many of the under-secretaries of state, holding positions analogous to our civil service clerks, to whom we may award a C. B. or even a knighthood.

There was much that was objectionable about Athenian slavery; but it was not what we mean by slavery and the lot of the slave compared more than favourably with that of a large fraction of our free population.

And how recently have we been clear of this stain? Britain since 1838. The United States since 1865. There are plenty of slaves alive now and owners who inherited slaves in their youth. Indeed, can we say that our modern Western Civilizations are clear of this thing? What of the Congo atrocities? What of the Putamayo atrocities? What of the white-slave traffic? Immorality there has been at all times in the world's history, but it appears to be one of the triumphs of modern civilization to reduce it to a science.

Now we must not make a mistake. With all these blots on our civilization it does not mean 'that its moral standards are not high in the story of man's development. To think so would be to make as unjust a mistake as we are apt to make with regard to Athens. But to deny to a people the claim to have developed their

moral being, who can set us an example and teach us with regard to our duty to our neighbour, the sense of proportion of the values of life, moral restraint, anti-materialism, antisensationalism, and even in certain directions with regard to freedom and justice amounts to something very like arrogance and impertinence, particularly when we remember the inestimable advantages of our religion, which might have been expected to lead to more striking results.

We may, there

fore, be justified in shading over the second section of our disc.

We turn, then, to the third element, the artistic, the central element of our inquiry. We have al

ready seen some

thing of the Greek love of beauty in the intimacy of the relationship of beauty to life. How did this work out in the environment of the Greek?

In the first place, he practically never built a city or temple without some regard to the