chiefly with land, where the commercial classes have raised the plebeian element to be one of nearly equal power to the patrician, and where no third power holds the balance between these two conflicting interests, and where no constitutional machinery deadens the shock of their conflicts, each in turn, instead of desiring that limited exaltation which a constitution allows, aims at the absolute extirpation of the other. The oligarchs and the democrats, in the small states of Greece, marked their advent to power by the forcible expatriation and deportation of the conquered faction. At Rome in the time of Marius and Sylla, at Corcyra as described by Thucydides*, among the Italian Greeks, and with the Guelfs and Ghibelines, the Bianchi and the Neri in Italy, and in French history in the first thirty years of this century, party rancour carried men to the same extremes of horrors and atrocity, simply because the idea of a constitutional opposition was unknown, and is in fact impracticable without a third and counterbalancing element of independent power. The nearest approach to such violence in England was in the expulsion of the Cavaliers, and in the banishment of Bolingbroke and the execution of Russell+,-both at times when the third element in England was itself so seriously perturbed as to be unable to right the vessel of the state, and when it was in truth the very near equality of the contending factions, and the fact that they were struggling, not so much for the mastery over each other as to carry into effect their views respecting the Crown, that led them ultimately to feel that a compromise was the only means of getting out of the quarrel. An Act of Grace is the noblest and most characteristic exercise of the Royal prerogative in England.

In all these contests in any country except England, one power, the patrician, has been a declining one, and the Thucydides, iii. 70. 85.

† See Lord J. Russell's English Government and Constitution, p. 216. Macaulay's History of England, iii. 577.

other an advancing one. The advances which are apparently made by the patricians are in fact but a resumption of what they had previously lost, when the tide of plebeian inroad having for a time overreached itself, ebbs back from the power it has gained, but cannot keep, to regather its forces, and with the next wave to submerge for ever the shore it has left bare. There has been but one end to the strife-the victory of the popular party, although that victory has often been obtained by its placing itself under a political general who has himself conquered the conquerors. Such a person was the Tupavvos of Grecian and the imperator of Roman history.

τυραννος

When such a catastrophe permanently arrives, and the former balance of parties cannot be restored, the national acme begins to wane, for without the freedom ensured by party government the glory of nations cannot last.

CHAP. XIV.

THE ANARCHY OF THOUGHT.

"The problem of the age is to reconcile faith with knowledge, philosophy with religion."-ARCHDEACON HARE.

IN the last five chapters I have sought to explain after a rough fashion the construction of societies in their acme, and the machinery by which they work. Let us now go beyond the anatomist and search out the breath of life which when once infused into dormant and sluggish nations calls them forth to the full glories of the acme. Let us dare to inquire into the soul of nations.

Again we start from the position that in national development there are two currents of civilisation, the one Homeric, the other Hesiodic, the first belonging eminently to the conquering, the second to the conquered race; but in the earlier stages of national progress, while the civilisation of the conquering race is imposed without contradiction on the whole population, the Homeric current of thought and feeling pervades the mind of the whole nation; and as it naturally arises among the members of the conquering race, so it is not unnaturally imposed on the conquered, who differ from their conquerors in little else than in weakness and the habits which a poor and servile life produce.

Now of these early ages it is a principle immutable that the minds of men are moved principally by their

emotions, not by their reason. As nations advance, and the civilisation of the conquered race rises to prominence, reason rather than emotion forms the link of the association of our ideas. Yet never of course is there a time when reasoning does not influence to a certain moderate extent the minds of men, nor ever was there a nation in which the emotions had utterly abandoned the sway of the association of ideas. But as in the Homeric current of civilisation emotions rule, so in the early ages of nations, when that civilisation is supreme, emotions almost banish cool reasoning from the mind; and as in the Hesiodic current reason rules the association of ideas, so in later ages, as the Hesiodic current of civilisation becomes more and more powerful in moulding the general civilisation, reason more than half deposes emotion from the sway of the human mind.

We, who live in an age of hard and exact reasoning, when education trains the mind to stifle the thoughts that are born of emotions, look back with contempt on the unenlightened ages when this canopy of the emotions shaded the human mind from the bright rays of reason. Our pride is in a measure justified. No nation steps forward to seize the torch of human progress till reason rules its leading minds. Inventions, arts, the subtle devices that lead to material prosperity, they are fruits which cannot ripen out of the mind of man, unless the rays of reason shine unclouded upon it.

Yet how beautiful the flowers that have grown under the canopy of the emotions, and which cannot bloom without that kindly shelter! How sweet the memory of the ages of faith!

The ages of faith are the ages of national youth. Let others dispute whether fetichism is the natural state of religious belief among uncultivated men. The savage who sees a god in every tree, and invents a genius for every storm, who in fact, conscious in himself of a power and a will capable of performing some, incapable of per

forming other acts, imagines that for the accomplishment of superhuman efforts there must exist beings whose organisation resembles his own, and who differ only in the possession of a superior power and an unconstrained will-him, rightly or wrongly the father of rational religion, let us pass with as small a share of notice as we have previously bestowed on the father of civilisation; but let us embrace the eternal truth, that the first ages of national life are the ages of belief.

What are the emotions which prevail in the minds of the founders of nations? Be they peasants, shepherds, warriors, pirates, they have the feeling of wonder and awe developed to an extent that we can hardly imagine, and accompanied by a vivid consciousness of human insignificance, and the credulity which never fails to follow fear. Shall we be surprised at this? surrounded as they are by the great and unexplained movements of nature, powerless to counteract or guide them, accustomed to see no agency but that of the most open and palpable force, and scattered in sparse populations, often the unresisting prey of the tempest and the torrent. Divines may discuss whether this is a true religious feeling, but at least we may make certain that as knowledge increases and man's power over nature becomes greater, this rude foundation of natural worship becomes daily less, though while it lasts the foundations are deeply laid in the minds of men for the firm establishment of an unchecked theocracy.

For, as the secular institutions of a nation depend for their existence on the social elements present in a nation, so the theocratic institution depends on the mental characteristics of the population.

In the earlier ages, when emotion guides the association of ideas, faith rules untroubled by reason, and as a natural consequence of this, we find that in the first scenes of every incipient civilisation, the priest is enthroned as a power, not always the first in name, but the first in sub