In the ancient City-state, on the other hand, the district was all powerful. The State was almost a sensuous fact. The members of the State were essentially friends and neighbours, who for business or pleasure were meeting all day long. When the district thus absorbs the State, there is a want of what we call freedom, though there may be enough of sensuous unconstraint. The State and its ideal purposes are not clearly set above all flesh and blood. A great legal system is not created till the State ceases to be a neighbourhood. Individual intimacy [1] and the “hard case” obscure the idea of universal law. The possibility of representative government, of a political faith which does not work by sight, is not conceived. The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree more liberating than the natural fact of kinship. [2] It was not conceived that man, as man, belonged “neither to this place nor to Jerusalem.” With the ideal unity of a modern nation such conceptions harmonise much more readily, and the neighbourhood can lend them flesh and blood without hiding them.
[1] Imagine a Roman or English judge being addressed as Demosthenes, in his speech against Pantaenetus, addressed (in his client’s name) the Athenian jury: “I know I have a hurried gait and a loud voice, and it annoys people; but I am as I was made, and I have a right to justice all the same.” It sounds like a speech to a jury of schoolboys.
5. “Class” is in democratic countries no longer a political institution. A man’s vote is secured to him on a minimum qualification, and his practical influence and acceptance depend neither on { 311} birth nor on occupation, but on the power which he can exercise by his qualities or his possessions. This is a consequence of the recognition of humanity as such, and has its bad side and its good side according to the baseness and nobility of the influences which tell _de facto_ upon human nature. It is horrible, we may say, that influence should belong to wealth without any security whatever for a discharge of social function. But this, given human nature as it is to-day, is a result of the same causes which enable us to boast, with some truth, that a man ranks in the general world by his powers, character, and behaviour, and that we do not know or care whether his livelihood comes to him as a miner or as a duke. Wealth has weight because people give it weight; but no one need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse unless he likes. It is a consequence, then, of the recognition of free humanity that “class” no longer is an institution in political right as such, while in social intercourse, though it practically exists as an institution, it claims to be an expression of what people are in character and behaviour, and its differences are not annexed by any iron bond to differences of occupation. [1]