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Excerpt from The Political Institutions of the Ancient Greeks Political Institutions, though he has attained this great result by a method which is not purely comparative, and which, as it takes no heed of historical sequence of events, has not stood him in good stead where he treats of historical European communities and their constitutions. The part the most interesting and important part - of the study, that which is concerned with civilised peoples and govern ments, seems to me not yet to be science. It does indeed enable us to lay down empirical rules, or rules founded solely on observation, about peoples and governments, just as the study of a language enables a grammarian to lay down empirical rules about words and sentences. And further, among the rules which have been laid down, there are some, (their number is, I believe, very small, ) which seem to be distinguished from the rest in two respects, firstly because they are not subject to any known exception, and secondly because some of the causes which lie at the root of them have been discovered: and these rules have something of the character of scientific laws, or rules which are true, not only in all known instances, but universally. But, on the other hand, most of the rules which have as yet been laid down are of a different sort, and, either because they are vague and indefinite, or because they are subject to many exceptions, or for other like reasons, nothing of the nature of a scientific law has been founded on them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our editio