iS8  THE  ECONOMIC  BACKGROUND

to  a  rigorous  measure  of  exclusion  of  the  alien  trader,
with  a  view  to  the  profits  arising  from  the  situation  of
Attica  being  confined  to  its  citizens.  But  doubtless  the  '
experience  of  the  immediate  past  had  shown  that  the
concentration  of  wealth  in  few  hands  was  a  marked  feature
of  the  public  economy  at  a  time  when  the  metic  element
was  small  within  the  state.  Furthermore,  the  most  ele-
mentary economic  and  mercantile  experience  might  suggest
that  the  major  processes  of  commerce  were  beyond  the
capacity  of  the  average  member  of  the  proletariate.^

The  Themistoklean  policy  was  essentially  empirical :  it
could  not,  indeed,  be  otherwise  in  that  age  of  the  world.
It  was  founded  on  the  theory  which  has  been  already
enunciated,  that  the  citizen  of  the  state  has,  at  any  rate,
a  first  charge  on  the  natural  advantages  which  the  state
has  to  offer.  Doubtless  Greek  state  individualism  would
have  urged  his  sole  claim  to  such  advantages,  had  not  the
maintenance  of  such  a  claim  been  already  proved  to  be
practically  impossible.  Men  did  not  understand  what  lay
at  the  root  of  the  practical  impossibility;  but,  being  obliged
to  accept  the  fact,  evolved  in  Attica  an  extraordinary
social  and  economic  system  which  developed  in  its  second
phase  into  the  Periklean  democracy,  and,  in  its  third,  into
the  democracy  of  the  fourth  century.
