22: _The Rambler_, March 1862.]

[Footnote 323: _Works_, ii. 47. This is one of the passages which,
seventy years ago, were declared to be treasonable. We trust we run no
risk in confessing that we entirely agree with it.]

[Footnote 324: Tocqueville, _L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution_, Preface,
p. xvi.]

[Footnote 325: "From what I have observed, it is pride, arrogance, and a
spirit of domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, that has
caused and kept up those oppressive statutes. I am sure I have known
those who have oppressed Papists in their civil rights exceedingly
indulgent to them in their religious ceremonies, and who really wished
them to continue Catholics, in order to furnish pretences for
oppression. These persons never saw a man (by converting) escape out of
their power but with grudging and regret" (Burke. "On the Penal Laws
against Irish Catholics," _Works_, iv. 505).

"I vow to God, I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate
death for opinions I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and his
opinions at once, than to fret him into a feverish being tainted with
the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground,
an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and corrupting all
about him" (Speech at Bristol, _ibid._ iii. 427).]

IX

NATIONALITY[326]

Whenever great intellectual cultivation has been combined with that
suffering which is inseparable from extensive changes in the condition
of the people, men of speculative or imaginative genius have sought in
the contemplation of an ideal society a remedy, or at least a
consolation, for evils which they were practically unable to remove.
Poetry has always preserved the idea, that at some distant time or
place, in the Western islands or the Arcadian region, an innocent and
contented people, free from the corruption and restraint of civilised
life, have realised the legends of the golden age. The office of the
poets is always nearly the same, and there is little variation in the
features of their ideal world; but when philosophers attempt to admonish
or reform mankind by devising an imaginary state, their motive is more
definite and immediate, and their commonwealth is a satire as well as a
model. Plato and Plotinus, More and Campanella, constructed their
fanciful societies with those materials which were omitted from the
fabric of the actual communities, by the defects of which they were
inspired. T