The small size and slight strength of early free
states made them always liable to easy destruction.
And their internal frailty is even greater. As soon as discussion
begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern
communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by
ages of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a
vital topic for discussion is well started the keenest and most
violent passions break forth. Easily destroyed as are early free
states by forces from without, they are even more liable to
destruction by forces from within.
On this account such states are very rare in history. Upon the first
view of the facts a speculation might even be set up that they were
peculiar to a particular race. By far the most important free
institutions, and the only ones which have left living
representatives in the world, are the offspring either of the first
constitutions of the classical nations or of the first constitutions
of the Germanic nations. All living freedom runs back to them, and
those truths which at first sight would seem the whole of historical
freedom, can be traced to them. And both the Germanic and the
classical nations belong to what ethnologists call the Aryan race.
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